Little One
by The Geordie Lass
Summary: Because what this site needs is yet another FFVII time travel fic: Aerith's healing rain was supposed to have cleansed JENOVA's taint from Gaia forever, but when Sephiroth still keeps coming back, each time seeming even closer to winning, AVALANCHE decide that they have to try something desperate. Problem is, Cloud isn't ruthless enough to do what he said he would. So now what?
1. Prologue

This has been sitting on my laptop for several months now, so it was time to either publish it or delete it.

NB When this says 'Prologue', it means it – it's a slow start and is here for background and set-up.

I know that after Aerith's healing rain, Sephiroth probably isn't supposed to be able to come back (maybe, probably... I think) but he's a tenacious one and, here, he's already managed to come back twice more – I'll get to how later:

* * *

 **Prologue – After the Fourth Reunion**

On their return from Edge's newest hospital, the blond man sat in the kitchen flexing his new prosthetic fingers.

"This changes things – everything." He said, frowning at his replacement hand.

"He cut your hand off, you were weakened by blood-loss and you _still_ beat him. Concentrate on _that_ , if you can." The dark-haired woman replied quietly, as she sat down next to him, taking hold of the new metal hand.

"I've always been _so_ close to losing to him, though. And next time he comes back... or maybe the next one after that... I'm already over thirty, older than _him_ now, since I don't suppose _he_ ages, spending almost all of his time mostly dead or... whatever the hell he really is. Even as heavily mako-ed up as I am, I won't last forever, especially if he keeps chopping bits off me! _He_ can, I'd guess – last forever, I mean. And who knows how many... pieces of the psycho alien bitch are still left? How many clones... _other_ clones" he corrected bitterly, gesturing at himself "are still... held somewhere... in cryo?... Or... something? And even if there aren't, who's to say he couldn't generate more damned remnants somehow... And how the hell do we know what Jenova looked like to begin with? Maybe it could spontaneously generate new body parts... or..."

"Cloud." She interrupted, gently chiding, hiding her worry – deep worry because this just wasn't Cloud; he didn't talk like this. Actually, when he was especially anxious or upset, he usually didn't talk much at all.

"All right, so it probably couldn't and _maybe_ he'll never come back and try for another Reunion, but this was the fourth attempt and... and we certainly can't be sure it'll be the last. And I'm _so tired_ of it, Teef. This one left me with a false hand. The last one left me with..." He raised his metal hand to the vicious-looking scar that ran from chin to temple along one side of his face. "Well, let's just say I'll never again be the pretty boy who could drag up convincingly." He said with an attempt at humour that had a bitter edge.

Despite herself, her lips twitched at the recollection of Cloud in a dress, wig, tiara and make-up – apparently, he'd even gone so far as to acquire the right _underwear._ Cloud was always thorough and Aerith had always been _very_ persuasive!

"You'd _want_ to?" She asked, raising a brow, before bending forward to kiss him on the scar, where it ran down his cheek. He didn't flinch when her lips touched it; even just a year ago he would have.

"Planet, no! I don't think I've ever felt so self-conscious in my life! I think the only reason I went along was that I was still mostly Zack, in my head, and he never could say no to Aerith about _anything_!" He smiled fondly, though it was always bitter-sweet, thinking of the flower-girl who he had once been so confused about, the flower-girl who he'd failed, so spectacularly, to protect. Of course, Cloud been confused about pretty much everything back then.

Suddenly he flicked his new metal fingers and they transformed into a blade – the hollow blade which had, until two days ago, made up the front edge of his fusion sword. He looked at it for a long moment, a small frown between his brows and then it twitched and transformed back.

"Stop trying to second guess yourself." She said, interpreting the expression on his face. "You said it was the blade you used most often in your off-hand, so it makes most sense for that one to have been... grafted on."

"Maybe it'll become a theme for AVALANCHE. Maybe we could find a way to get Cerberus to transform into a gauntlet for Vincent."

"You do know you're in a really weird mood, don't you?" She asked, frowning, deciding to give up on the pretence that everything was right in their world.

"Hey, we just beat the dreaded Calamity, yet again, but not before he chopped my hand off and cremated it right in front of me; I have a right!... I'm also on enough painkillers to anaesthetise a large flock of chocobos." He rubbed at his face with his hands, wincing as he felt metal against his skin.

"Oh!" She said, finally realising that she should have remembered about the painkillers; they probably explained weirdly-talkative-yet-pessimistic-Cloud. She pulled his hands away from his face and held them in her own.

"The others are all coming round on Sunday, before they all head out from Edge. We can sit down and discuss what we need to do if... if _he_ comes back again. Maybe... maybe we have to think again about what Reeve said a couple of years back about a new generation of mako-enhanced fighters. The monsters aren't going away and... if _he_ comes back... I mean, Denzel, for one..."

"Is _never_ going near so much as a _drop_ of mako in his entire life, supposing I have to tie him up and sit on him until the day I die!" He interrupted.

"All he wants is to be just like you."

"He's _sixteen_ , he doesn't realise what that really _means_ , Teef!"

"I know, but... you need to talk to him about it again... _please_. As far as he's concerned you never really made it into the 'boring old dad' role, instead, you're like some über-cool big-brother he can hero-worship, even though he'd never admit to that. It's the way you have of saving the world a lot."

"The way _we_ have." He corrected absently. "Hmm." Having known him all of her life, Tifa was pretty fluent in unintelligible-Cloud-noises. The tone of this one seemed to indicate that, while he wasn't sure if he entirely concurred with what she'd just said, he'd still do as she asked.

She got up and went to the sink and began to fill the kettle. Cloud came up behind her and put his arms around her, resting his chin on her shoulder. He insinuated his hands under her top so that they spanned the bare skin of her waist. Though she could have kicked herself for it, his new metal hand was unfamiliar and cold on her skin and she flinched, just a little.

By the time she turned, he had moved, obviously with enhanced speed, to the far side of the kitchen, and was now leaning against the dresser with his arms folded, a shuttered look to his eyes and a dark expression on his face. He hadn't left the room, though, which was probably a positive sign.

 _Oh, great!_ She thought. _Something else for him to be overly-sensitive about!_ It had taken her the best part of two years to convince him that the facial scar wasn't hideous and didn't make him any less attractive in her eyes. Now _this_!

"For the Planet's sake, Cloud! Your new hand's metal; it was a bit cold. If you'd put your belt buckle or... or your _earring_ against my skin and it was cold I'd have flinched – I can't help that. It _doesn't_ mean I don't want you to touch me!" She was so desperate to make him take notice that she was almost shouting and so she tried to tone her voice down, knowing his enhanced hearing could be sensitive. She checked her watch and swore softly.

"If we had time, I'd drag you upstairs and make you run _both_ of your hands all over my naked body just to prove how much I want you to touch me! As it is, the kids'll be home from school in less than twenty minutes."

He gave a flirty pout that she recognised as a mannerism more of Zack than Cloud; something which no longer happened often, and now amused, rather than disconcerted her, as it had when she first understood what she was seeing. When she moved back to the sink to finish filling the kettle, he moved back into his previous position and she was very glad when, even though his hand was still a little cold, she managed not to wince this time. She turned off the water, and turned around in his arms to kiss him.

He pulled back, a provocative smirk curving his lips. "So... quickie?"

She reflexively checked her watch again, then took him by the good wrist and hauled him into the adjacent laundry-room, just in case the 'quickie' wasn't quite quick enough for a family room like the kitchen, with the children due back.

* * *

A quarter-hour later, they'd nearly been caught with their pants down, so very nearly caught, in fact, that fourteen-year-old Marlene had immediately deduced just what they had been doing – unfortunately she was old enough to pick up on it, now – and they'd been treated to a round of "Ugh... yuk... you two are _old..._ eww! Seriously?... Just... _eww_!" as they'd emerged, fully dressed but still straightening clothes, as well as somewhat flushed and flustered, from the laundry, as they'd finally heard her clattering through the house and into the kitchen, calling for them.

Having got over his embarrassment, especially strong as he knew he should have heard her much sooner, even if he was caught up in the moment – enhanced hearing and all that – Cloud eventually shushed Marlene, when she began to make exaggerated retching noises, and informed her, as sternly as he could manage, that Tifa and he were married and allowed to do what they wanted, where they wanted, in their own damned house!

With a slightly amused expression on her face, Tifa let him deal with it, while she rooted around in the fridge, trying to decide what to cook that evening – she was well out of it and it was fun to let Cloud deal with Marlene in this mood; he was getting so endearingly flustered. It also seemed to be keeping his mind away from dark thoughts – and she'd already done her very best to distract him from those, a few minutes before.

"Yeah, but you're way too old to be... you know... in the _laundry_. Eww!"

"I'm _thirty-one,_ Marlene, that's not _old_. Teef's _thirty_! Gaia, why am I even having this argument? Fine! Whatever! The _old people_ promise to try not to disgust your delicate teenage sensibilities by having sex all over the house, even when you aren't here! Not _too_ often, anyway!"

"Eww!"

"Yeah, well, 'eww', if you like, but just shut up about it, and go and start your homework, okay?" Cloud said sharply, feeling harassed. "Where's Denz, anyway?"

"Standing on the corner, snogging Ferne, so I came on ahead to try to get away from _that_ and you two are, like, a _million_ times worse!" Cloud rolled his eyes as he turned away, not even acknowledging that. Marlene went through to the closed bar and he could hear her begin to take her books out of her school-bag huffily and arrange them on one of the tables.

He went to try to help Tifa with preparing dinner but was told to sit down again – told that he was newly out of hospital and was supposed to rest, adding that she knew better than to try to make him do anything more than just sit still, though.

He grinned and kissed her briefly.

"And us going at it like a pair of horny teenagers in the laundry was supposed to be 'restful'?" In response to that, she gave him a naughty smile.

"Let's call it... relaxation... at least until Marls almost caught us at it! Now, sit!" She pointed at the nearest chair.

 _Actually, let's **also** call it 'temporarily stopping you dwelling on the idea that the next time __**he**_ _comes back, you think it won't be_ _ **him**_ _who dies!_ She added internally.

He sighed, as he reseated himself, reaching for the large cookie jar that was resting on the table.

"I was thinking... what you were saying earlier, Teef? New SOLDIERs could only be a bad thing... you can't tell me that Rufus Shinra would supply the scientific know-how for nothing... in fact, he'd almost certainly want to be the one who controlled any new SOLDIERs. I've already _told_ Reeve!"

"Reeve knows all that, Cloud, but the monsters aren't going away and if _he_ comes back again, surely you won't refuse the backup? Barret's closer to fifty than forty now, so is Reeve, Cid's not so far behind and, given that he smokes like a chimney and his knees are no longer up to all the jumps..." She shrugged. "Yuffie's the only one under thirty... well Vincent, I guess, is _physically_ still in his late-twenties, and always will be. And Nanaki, of course, doesn't really age much, and it's not like it's Reeve who actually fights... all right, so most of us are still pretty much in our prime but, if _he_ keeps coming back, there's going to have to be a younger generation coming through, some time."

"Well, thank-you for making me feel even older than Marlene just tried to!"

" _You_ were the one who started on this theme, just after we got home!" She took a couple of deep breaths.

 _Okay, Tifa, bite your tongue; the painkillers are making him talkative and irritable..._

"And maybe part of the _other_ issue isn't just that I want you to want me to touch you with this hand, maybe it's how much I'm going to miss feeling how soft your skin is when I do that!" He muttered low enough that she only just caught it.

... _and also morose and depressed. Oh Goddess!_

She knew that the hand must be horrendous for him – it would be completely horrifying to anyone, but perhaps especially to such an accomplished, dual-wielding swordsman – but she'd hoped that he could try to focus on the positive; they'd all survived and he'd yet again killed off the entity who kept coming back from the dead to threaten the planet.

She put down the knife she'd been chopping onions with and went over to Cloud. Sighing, she retrieved the cookie jar, that he'd been systematically emptying, from his hands – a metabolism with his level of mako-enhancement could be so damned expensive in food – and plunked herself down in his lap, pulling him into a tight embrace.

"I'm sorry, Sweetheart." She said, moving her face so that she could look down into his.

The apology and the endearment drew a puzzled half-smile from him.

"What for, Love? You've nothing to be sorry for." His voice was gentle now.

"I don't even have the words for how sorry I am about your hand; it must be horrific for you. I'm sorry that there'll undoubtedly be more _publicity_ ; I know how you hate all that 'Saviour of the Planet' crap – Reeve's PR people have only managed to keep them away, these last three days, because you were in hospital – and I'm also sorry that your childhood hero keeps coming back from the dead to try to kill you." _I'm sorry and terrified that the hand has knocked your confidence so much that you're more than half-convinced he'll succeed, if it happens again._

"Oh, as for that... I'm not sure if there's much of the 'Hero of Wutai' left inside that... _thing_ , any more. I don't think I ever had a lot of specific Zack-memories of him, but Zack definitely liked him and, while Zack liked most people, I've definitely always had a 'sense' that Zack thought of him as a friend, of sorts; Zack was actually a lot more discerning about his _real_ friendships than you'd suppose, considering how naturally gregarious he was.

"And... he was actually... kind, I suppose, the only time I met him... awkward but vaguely considerate on that journey to Nibelheim. I was huddled in the back of the truck, trying not to puke my guts up and, as the First of the Firsts, he shouldn't even have deigned to notice my existence, but instead he asked after my health, more than once, and tried to take my mind off it by asking me some things about Nibelheim – Zack must have told him it's where I was from, I guess. His manner was so stiff, and a bit distracted, but he was _trying_ – he knew I was Zack's friend, and so was he, so he made the effort, even though I was just a grunt. I honestly don't think Sephiroth was exactly a _bad_ man... before."

She stared at him as if he'd grown a second head.

"Haven't I ever said this before? I really don't think he was. It's not like it's ever held me back from killing what's left of him, but I don't think he was exactly a bad person before the psychosis, or whatever, set in. A bit peculiar, perhaps - only to be expected with his background and upbringing, poor bastard - but not _bad_ or _evil..._ or whatever."

"Hey, Cloud, Teef." Denzel said from the doorway. Unlike Marlene would have been, he was totally unperturbed by the sight of his 'parents' cuddling. "Why, exactly, is Marls doing her _homework_? It's Friday night." Cloud looked at him blankly, for a moment, while Tifa just smiled as she got up and went back to preparing the meal. Cloud sighed deeply.

"Probably because I told her to." He said, now looking slightly sheepish. "Because, I suppose you could say that... I've been a bit _busy_ this week and I lost track of the days! And she probably realised that discretion was the better part of valour, since, if I had to hear 'eww' one more time, I'd have got really annoyed and sent to her room, even if she is getting a bit old for that now!"

"'Eww'?"

" _Don't_ ask!"

"O- _kay._ We thought we might go out to the cinema, later. You two wanna come with, since Teef's not reopening the bar until tomorrow? Marls too; make it a family thing?"

It struck Cloud, not for the first time, that it was probably a bit odd that Denzel would occasionally ask his parents and sister along on 'dates'. Probably a by-product of the fact that Ferne had been his best friend for far longer than they'd been going out together and she had almost always shared in family outings when she was younger. Another orphan of the Geostigma, Ferne had first become known to Cloud and Tifa simply as 'the Moogle Girl'. She was a really nice girl... who, to Cloud's surprise, had just jabbed Denzel sharply in the ribs with her elbow.

"Don't you think the _first_ thing you should have been asking Cloud is how he is?" She hissed at her boyfriend, before going over to Tifa and offering to lend a hand with dinner – she could easily lend any aid, as she was totally familiar with the kitchen, eating about sixty percent of her meals at this house. Cloud gave Denzel an amused, slightly sympathetic look.

"Oh... yeah. How are you doing?" The boy asked, grinning ruefully.

"Fine" he waggled his metal fingers at Denzel, pretending that they didn't bother him. "Seems to work okay."

"Blade too?"

Cloud nodded and flicked the fingers and the hollow blade replaced them.

"Cool!"

No, actually, Cloud thought morosely, it had been 'cool' to wield the secondary blade of his choice in his off-hand, but since his metal hand would never have actual feeling, or anything like the dexterity of a real one, a 'blade-arm' had seemed the best compromise. He flicked the blade and it turned back into fingers.

"So... do you _actually_ want your 'old mum and dad' along, or have you just spent all your allowance and you're expecting us to pay?" He asked. Denzel looked uncomfortable.

"He _has_ spent his allowance, and I've only got enough of mine left to pay for me, but it would still be really nice to have you all along, especially after... earlier this week. And you and Tifa are hardly _old_!" Ferne said from behind him. Cloud tipped his head right back to make upside-down eye-contact and smile at her.

"Tell that to Marls! I suppose... as long as we don't get mobbed by the fu- erm," catching Tifa's look for being about to use the f-word in front of the 'children' he quickly corrected to " _damned_ tabloid press... Teef, you up for it?" He asked.

"If you're sure; there'll probably be some of them about. I'm fairly sure I saw one of them with a long-lens on the roof across the street, as you got out of the van. Denz, go and ask your sister if she wants to go. And tell her Cloud doesn't really expect her to spend her entire Friday night doing her homework."

Cloud listened to the inevitable argument that started between brother and sister as soon as the cinema was mentioned and they each expressed their very dissimilar preferences. Eventually they came in and consulted Ferne, then finally decided to ask the adults. Cloud really didn't care. After fighting and killing Sephiroth again, just earlier in the week, it was simply wonderful to be at home with his family, the warmth of them all around him and the smells of Tifa's cooking. Even the sounds of squabbling was almost music to his ears because they were all alive, fit and healthy enough to be bickering about something so trivial.

He would have to talk to the rest of AVALANCHE to see what ideas they had for protecting the Planet the next time Jenova and Sephiroth made a bid to destroy Gaia. He couldn't help feeling that it was 'when' and not 'if' and even the idea that he might slip, fail, was not something that could be borne.

* * *

 **Author's Note:**

Damn! Given that this isn't my usual fandom, I was aiming for something slightly different to what I normally write, and what did I produce? Three-and-a-half thousand words that are nearly all talking – so _exactly_ what I normally write! I guess I just have to stick with what I know!

Just to say, if you like your Cloud 'all emo', you probably won't like him here too much, since I intend him to have the full range of human emotions, not just the depressing ones. I don't entirely get where that comes from, really; I know the film plays it up, but the guy has a terminal illness during that, and the imagery seems to imply that the Geostigma is affecting his thought processes and mood on top of that so, I admit, he's not exactly Mr Happy, right then, but using his character in the two games as a better indicator (once he's stopped having such an attitude, at first, in the original), I just don't see him as being particularly depressive or even especially taciturn.

I'm trying to stay more or less canon-compliant with the background to this, but I originally had Cloud say "I'm not sure if there's much of 'Shinra's Silver General' left inside that... _thing_ " and "the General" where it now says "First of the Firsts" but I've been replaying FF7 lately and there's nothing about Sephiroth having any rank other than SOLDIER First Class in it. Which makes sense; ShinRa is a company, not a country, so SOLDIER is more of a paramilitary than a military organisation, in reality, so why would they have a General?

(That's right, I've been totally corrupted by too much fan fiction! There's not one mention in FF7 of him being a General, and I couldn't remember anything in Crisis Core, either, so I did a bit of googling and discovered that 'General Sephiroth' is pure fanon. Any SOLDIER with a rank other than First, Second or Third Class is non-canon-compliant. I have to admit, I'm feeling almost shocked about this!


	2. Chapter 1 - The Man

So this is about one year after (and nearly forty years before) the Prologue. What's happened in between should become obvious as the story progresses and it, honestly, wasn't exactly riveting when I tried to write it.

* * *

 **Chapter One – The Man**

Sephiroth was three years, eight months and two days old when he first saw the man.

Through terrified, tear-filled eyes Sephiroth saw that the man standing over him had bright, spiky, blond hair, a huge scar running all the way down the right side of his face and was dressed all in black with bare arms with a shiny badge shaped like an animal's head on the front of one shoulder. He also had a sword in each hand. He blinked blearily up at the man from where he lay, strapped supine, on a metal table and realised, no, the man did have a huge sword in his right hand, but he had a sword _instead of_ a left hand. The man's face looked odd; sort of all twisted up.

The man said a word that Sephiroth didn't know. It came out explosively and he thought it might be a rude word. Then the man's left-hand-sword twitched and somehow turned into a hand - a _metal_ hand - which he ran through his messy hair as he said.

"Gaia! I can't do this! _Look_ at him; he's practically a _baby!_ " The man started to gently pull the needles that attached Sephiroth to the monitors from his arms. That wasn't right, he _wasn't_ a baby, he was three-and-two-thirds! He might have said so, if he hadn't felt so sick after the green stuff - the mako - that Professor Hojo had put into his arms through the intravenous 'drip' that day – he'd never known why it was called that, it didn't drip, it just made stuff go slowly into your blood.

A pretty, dark-haired lady, also all in black, stepped to just within his line of vision, touching the man on the arm. He heard her say quietly "Cloud, you know what has to be done." She gestured slightly at Sephiroth, but didn't look at him.

The man stepped back from Sephiroth and separated his sword into two - which seemed weird - and handed the smaller piece to the woman.

"Fine, if it _has_ to be done, _you_ do it then!" He said then, after a moment, continued to carefully remove the needles and the 'drip' from Sephiroth's arms.

" _Me?_ I... can't, Cloud. Especially not when he's crying like that." She handed it back, still not looking at Sephiroth, and the man reattached the piece and sheathed his sword behind his back.

"Fine! What if we, say, sedated him - he'd stop crying - then would you do it?" The man spoke between clenched teeth.

"No... _of course not_!" She said, with only a slight hesitation.

"Are you two trippin'?" Someone shouted from across the room. Sephiroth could turn his head to look now - the strap across his forehead had just been unbuckled - but when he turned it, he felt dizzy and sick again. He thought, though, that it was the big, dark-skinned man who had shouted.

"Fine, Barret, I suppose _you're_ willing to murder the terrified, abused little boy?" The man asked, unbuckling Sephiroth's arm restraints. Murder _him_? What? _Sephiroth_? _No!_

"Cloud, ya know..." Sephiroth wanted to sit up, ready to scramble away as soon as he was free, get away from these people who seemed to want to hurt him. He couldn't even move; he felt so ill, so weak. He knew he had to stay here for ages yet, until the mako worked its way into him, made him strong, not weak...

"Don't give me any shit over this, Barret! Now that it's really happening, I don't believe you're any more capable of hurting a sick, terrified little boy than I am." The man – Cloud seemed to be his name – said harshly, unbuckling the final ankle restraint. He began to lift Sephiroth, surprisingly gently, but Sephiroth began to cry harder and try to push himself feebly away, thinking that now he _was_ going to be hurt – 'murdered' – he wasn't sure _exactly_ what that was, though he thought it might be like 'killed', but he knew, whatever it was, it was _really_ bad. He found himself cradled gently against the man, and for the first time the man's voice turned gentle.

"It's all right, little one, no-one's going to hurt you. Never again. No more needles, no more mako." He frowned and touched a gentle finger to one of the mostly healed cuts on Sephiroth's arm, from the previous day, and his voice went hard, then soft again. "No more knives. Don't cry, little one; no more need for tears, I promise." A green glow suffused the cuff on the man's wrist, and then Sephiroth's arm glowed briefly and the cuts were gone.

"Cloud?" A new voice, with a weird accent, came from behind Sephiroth. "Reeve anticipated the possibility of this. If this happened, I was to tell you that the chances for success are still very good, if we just take the boy and hide him away. He'll need a loving family and stability and his background explained properly to him, in detail – when he's a little older, though – so that the psychotic breakdown is unlikely to ever happen. I'm also to tell you that we have a stock of Aerith's water with us, so we ought to be able to neutralise the cells inside him. With JENOVA and Hojo gone, then it really shouldn't make too much difference to the outcome, not if we can find _all_ of the Project-S data, to ensure that she's truly _completely_ gone. Remember, our research said that all of the information should still be here, in the local records. We still need to find those notebooks and journals and anything else here."

Sephiroth didn't understand much of that at all, but at the word 'Hojo' he had stiffened as his fear spiked. Professor Hojo wasn't always present when he was given mako, but it was the Professor who usually did the most painful things to him. Yesterday, Professor Hojo had made progressively deeper and longer cuts on his arms and recorded how long it took them to stop bleeding, scab over, disappear altogether. He hadn't been very pleased when the last three hadn't healed completely. The man – Cloud – had touched the deepest of those – he remembered screaming and screaming when he'd felt the knife scraping against the bone when that one had been made, yesterday.

Sephiroth wasn't really sure why, but he'd heard one of the lab techs say that the mako today was because of that – it wasn't fair; it had only been nine days since the last treatment and it was usually fourteen between them. Today, he felt even sicker than normal, afterwards, and he'd had several seizures, to the point where he hadn't been allowed to return to his room but had been left strapped to this table when night fell.

When he had stiffened, Cloud had moved Sephiroth so that he was straddling the man's hip. Putting an arm around Sephiroth's waist to hold him there, he'd brought his other hand – his real hand – up to stroke Sephiroth's hair gently.

"It's all right, little one. Hojo can't hurt you any more; he can't hurt anyone any more. No-one's going to hurt you, I _promise_." He'd murmured gently.

Sephiroth wondered how; Professor Hojo seemed to like hurting him and he hadn't thought anyone could stop the Professor from doing it. He wanted to ask about that, but he was also kind of fascinated by the creature that had been speaking – it seemed to be a bipedal cat, only it was wearing a crown and a cape. He really wasn't sure what it was, since, to his knowledge, cats were not bipedal and did not wear any sort of clothing or other adornment. For that matter, he was positive they weren't supposed to be able to talk, either. Of course, he'd never actually had any contact with one, since there weren't any in the labs; he'd only seen pictures.

Sephiroth looked up at Cloud. The man looked very sad and he was sorry Cloud was sad – now that they had all stopped saying they would hurt him, it seemed to him like Cloud was kinder than anyone. He usually hated being carried, people only did it when he was too sick to walk after the mako, and it always meant that Professor Hojo would be annoyed at him for weakness if he found out... and when Professor Hojo was annoyed, things... weren't nice. But Cloud had said that the Professor wouldn't hurt him any more, that no-one would hurt him and, somehow, Sephiroth believed him. Being carried by Cloud like this made him feel warm and like no-one ever _could_ harm him... _safe_? Was that the word? He'd heard it and he thought he understood what it meant, but he'd never felt _safe_ before.

Cloud had carried him over to the door.

"S-Sephir... Seph, I want you to close your eyes, and I'm going to put my hand over them too. There are things out in the corridor that I don't think you should see. I just don't want you to be scared, OK? No-one's going to hurt you, little one, I promise." Cloud was saying that a lot, Sephiroth thought. That probably made it true, then? Maybe?

Sephiroth felt them begin to move again, before he smelled the blood. He knew the smell of blood well; it was a common scent in Professor Hojo's lab. Knowing there was blood and imagining what was bleeding was scary, but Cloud had said that he didn't want him to be scared so Sephiroth tried not to be. But it was hard and Sephiroth didn't realise at first that he had begun to cry softly again. Cloud pulled him a little closer and murmured soothingly to him.

As they walked, he heard a new voice, coming oddly from below and behind Sephiroth. Someone short, with a deep, low voice, was obviously keeping pace with them, and it couldn't be the cat with the funny accent, as the voice was all wrong.

"It is clear, Cloud, that you are claiming the little boy as your cub."

"I'm... _what_?" The soothing murmur was replaced with this sharp question.

"Come, now. We're all aware that you have had an unusually strong affinity for children, ever since the Geostigma was cured, and you have always had a protective streak a mile wide, but this is extreme behaviour, even for you. You've clearly decided to treat him as if he was your own young one.

"I... Nanaki... that's... not even the point, here."

"So, if any of us – your close friends for over a decade – decided that it would be for the best if we completed the plan, as originally conceived, you _wouldn't_ tell us that to get to him we would have to go through you?" Sephiroth heard and felt Cloud give a deep sigh.

"You know me too well, Nanaki!"

"I only say this because, while I am willing to do everything I can to help search and clear out these labs, you have hands and I do not. You are, therefore, better equipped to help with that task. If you will entrust your cub, your _little one_ , to me, I can take him back to the _Shera,_ where Reeve, Yuffie and the others can take care of him, away from this horrific place." Sephiroth felt them turn a corner and, as the scent of blood lessened, Cloud's hand was removed from his eyes, so he also opened them.

"Seph, this is Nanaki. I'm sure you heard that he's offering to take you out of here. He... and Cait Sith – that's him riding on Nanaki's back" Cloud pointed at the cat with the weird accent, who waved "can go back to our airship with you and introduce you to my other friends who are waiting for us. I'm sure they'd like to meet you and..." He trailed off as Sephiroth, somehow unable to help himself, buried his face against Cloud's chest and began to cling to him like a limpet. He didn't want to go anywhere with anyone other than Cloud, and certainly not with a huge predator. He wasn't actually sure if this was a giant cat or a really big red wolf, but either would be a carnivore and he knew such predators ate small mammals. Sephiroth knew that he himself qualified as a 'small mammal' when it came to something this big.

"That'd be a 'no' then?" Cloud said, not sounding upset. Sephiroth nodded and tensed; he was worried Cloud might be angry at him.

"What if I asked Tifa to take you instead? That's the pretty, dark-haired lady, over there." Sephiroth shook his head again, still clinging just as tightly, without even looking to where Cloud had gestured. He felt _safe_ with Cloud; he didn't think he could with anyone else. Cloud sighed.

"All right, Little One, I'll take you back to the ship, myself - I don't think you should be here any longer than you have to be.

"Teef, I'll send Denz back here to help with the search; that should mollify him. Seeing just the aftermath might give him some idea of why I insisted on 'treating him like a little kid', too, by keeping him away from it. Vincent, what do you want me to say to Yuffie to try to make her stay behind once she knows Denz is coming?" Cloud threw that last query over one shoulder as he began to shift Sephiroth around, apparently so that he could carry him more easily, one-handed.

"Cloud, I have just received a message from Yuffie to pass on." That voice was Cait Sith, Sephiroth knew. "She says that you must have rocks in that stupid-spiky-chocobo-head of yours if you think that, whether she's pregnant or not, Vinnie gets to decide what she does and doesn't do! And if you so much as roll your eyes at that, she says she's going to ram a shuriken, sideways, right up..."

"Thanks Cait, I get the gist." Cloud said in a flat voice. A Yuffie full of baby-hormones was such a _joy_ to deal with!

"Cait, please tell Yuffie," A deep calm voice came from behind Cloud, "that she is, of course, _welcome_ to try coming here, now that it is cleared of dangers, but that she will not enjoy the smells and the vomiting they are likely to induce. You can also say that, if it makes any difference to her, I would _prefer_ that she stay on the _Shera_ so that I can get on with what I need to do and _not_ have to deal with my continually retching wife!" There was a pause.

"Yuffie says to say that you _may_ have a point, but that Conformer also has five sharp ones, so just watch it, Vinnie!"

* * *

Yuffie turned to Reeve, who was still watching the feed from Cait Sith intently, occasionally speaking into the microphone or making inputs into a keyboard that were connected to the animatronic cat. Cait Sith usually ran completely autonomously, these days, but today he... _it_ was partially under Reeve's control.

"You really expected Cloud to be _this_ much of a mother chocobo over little Mother's Boy, there?" Yuffie asked.

"Maybe not quite _this_ much, but I certainly didn't think he'd be able to bring himself to kill the boy. Not a small child who had suffered under Hojo's tender mercies almost from the moment he was conceived. It really doesn't matter what he could later become, there was _no_ way that Cloud would have been able to kill him."

"Nanaki's right about the 'cub' thing isn't he? I give it a week... definitely no more than two, before Cloud's telling the Calamity Kid that he can call him 'dad'."

"Probably even less." Reeve said absently.

"Reeve, do you think Vincent's right, that I shouldn't go down there?"

"Probably."

"I kinda wanted to see Vinnie meet Vinnie, though. It'll be so _weird_!"

"Mmm, I'm sure you're right."

"You're ignoring me, Reeve!"

"Mmm. You seem restless, Yuffie. Why don't you go and tell Shera, Marlene, Denzel and Ferne that Cloud's coming back? And it would be helpful if you could brief Denzel on what's been happening, if Cloud's going to send him back in there. Then, if you _are_ going, the two of you will need to get your things together." Yuffie pulled a face at him, which Reeve either didn't notice or didn't respond to, then she rose and did as he had suggested.

"Should he really be going? Denz, I mean." Yuffie said, turning back, one hand on the door-frame.

"I don't know, but Cloud and Tifa had a hard enough time getting him to stay here earlier; he knows Cloud went into the army when he was several years younger than Denzel himself is now, he also knows he's older than _you_ were when you became a full member of the AVALANCHE team – even if that _was_ only to steal their materia." Yuffie stuck her tongue out at him, even though he wasn't looking at her. "Is it any wonder that he's champing at the bit to be part of this?"

"He just seems so young." She said.

"I know." Reeve gave a short huff of laughter. "Can you imagine how young _you_ seemed to me the first time I, through Cait, laid eyes on you? Can you imagine Marlene doing the things you were doing? Yet she's barely any younger."

"I... no, actually." She sighed. "Denz isn't wrong when he says we all try to wrap them up in cotton wool, is he?"

"No... but it doesn't necessarily mean it's wrong for us to try, either. Cloud, especially, wanted Denzel to have an easier time growing up than he had, and he's mostly succeeded, I think. If that's been at the expense of Denzel sometimes feeling over-protected, I think it was worth it!"

"Hmm. If Cloud has coddled Denz, how bad do you supposed he's going to be with the Weeny-Wannabe-World-Destroyer?" She saw Reeve roll his eyes, presumably at the appellation.

"Let's not worry about that right now, eh?"

"I know what Vinnie said isn't wrong, but I wanna to go down there with Denz, Reeve, I wanna see Vinnie. This whole thing is really... unsettling."

"Then go."

"I can always come away if things get too much."

"I'm not your boss any more; you don't have to justify yourself to me, Yuffie. To Vincent, perhaps."

"No I don't! He's my husband, not my _owner_!" She snapped.

Reeve ignored that – pregnancy was making Yuffie extremely temperamental – and that was extremely temperamental _for Yuffie_. Reeve found it best to ignore the moodiness entirely. Perhaps he, or someone, should try to talk to Yuffie about the concepts of shared responsibility and compromise within a marriage, though. Perhaps he could mention it to Tifa; he thought it might be better coming from her.

"Well then, you need to go and find Denzel and make your preparations for leaving." He said calmly.

* * *

There were too many trees in the grounds of the mansion to have landed an airship, so Cloud estimated that it would take him a quarter-hour to reach the plateau where the _Shera_ was waiting.

The child – _Sephiroth –_ had begun to whimper the moment that they had emerged into the open.

"Seph? _Seph!_ " The little boy felt like he was trying to burrow his way into Cloud's chest. Gaia! He suddenly thought of something.

"Have you ever been outside of those labs before?" He asked. A small rapid head-shake. "Okay, then, Little One, I suppose we'd better leave learning to appreciate the beauty of the great outdoors for another time, then." Cloud turned his gentle jog up the mountain path into a fast lope, assuming that the little boy would be more comfortable once he was inside the airship. Planet! This was worse than people, like Aerith, who had lived under the plate of Midgar all of their lives and never properly seen the sky. At least they had known, apart from that, what it was like to be out of doors. It probably would have been even worse if it hadn't been the dead of night. So odd to think that this was... _would have been,_ the famed, fearless SOLDIER First Class, this tiny, pitiable boy who was so scared of being out in the open that he trembled from head to feet.

 _I promised myself I wouldn't do this, I promised myself that, however bad I felt about it, I would do what was necessary, **whatever** was necessary. Why couldn't I have been the heartless bastard that the Planet needed me to be? I've probably endangered us all. One life over millions. I should just stop and..._ He glanced down at the little boy he was cradling tightly against himself. _Who am I kidding? Kill my 'cub'? And Nanaki always says he doesn't think he can read humans as well as other humans can – yet he pegged me exactly!_

Just as the airship came in sight, he spotted Yuffie and Denzel a few dozen metres away. Denzel gave him a cheery wave, while Yuffie glared pointedly for a moment at the little boy, then transferred that look to Cloud and just shook her head. He didn't stop to speak to them; Cloud didn't feel like justifying himself - wasn't sure if he even could.

He reached the Shera and met her namesake as he arrived on deck, along with Marlene and Ferne. He looked at Cid's wife warily, wondering if she would condemn him for endangering her children, much as he was still condemning himself.

"Cloud. Yuffie told us. I didn't think you'd have thought to pick him up any clean clothes and these are a bit small for Deryk now, I really can't think why we brought them with us. I think they'll only be a little big for him, since he's tall for his age. Poor little thing, he looks so ill."

"He's been given a mako treatment today. Gaia knows, that's bad enough when you're fully-grown!" Cloud had actually never had something so innocuous as a 'normal' mako treatment, but Zack had and he, therefore, had vague memories of nausea and lethargy and feeling totally spaced-out, followed by a huge burst of energy the following day. Little Seph might well be bouncing off the walls, come tomorrow... or he would have been, had he been a more normal child – who the hell knew what this one might do?

"He's been so out of it, I haven't even had the opportunity to work out whether he can even talk or not. So far all I've got from him has been nods or shakes of the head." He added worriedly. He liked Cid's wife, she was sensible and kind, and with three children of her own, she'd probably do what she could to help him now, as the small pile of clothes – underwear, a pair of pyjamas, two t-shirts and a pair of jeans – that she had handed over had demonstrated.

"C'n talk." Came a small muffled voice from the level of his chest, surprising Cloud. The whimpering and trembling had died away over the last five minutes or so, and Cloud hadn't been sure if the little boy had fallen asleep or, perhaps, passed out due to exhaustion.

"Oh... good." He said, nonplussed.

"Why don't you give him here, Dad? I can take him and you can get yourself a quick coffee, see Reeve and then head back." Marlene said.

"No." Cloud said, in a resigned tone, as the little head that had been snuggled into his chest shook frantically. "I wouldn't be here, if he'd have gone to Nanaki or Tifa. Seems like, for whatever reason, I'm the only one he trusts, right now. I'll go and see Reeve, briefly, and then maybe see if I can get Seph to sleep. The Goddess knows, it's the best thing for him, after mako. You couldn't make that coffee, for me, could you Marls, honey, please?" He tiredly ran a hand through blond spikes.

"I'll get it." Ferne, said, heading towards the galley. He wondered how the girl, tagging along, but not really part of this, was holding up. Denzel had told her what was happening and, on understanding that if what they were planning worked, there would be no Meteor and no Geostigma, but also that she, as she was now, would no longer exist, she had asked to come with them. Marlene and Denzel too, to a lesser extent, must be feeling like fish out of water; no wonder Denz was so keen to prove himself.

* * *

Reeve watched Cloud settle himself with a sigh onto a metal stool in his 'tech-closet', as Reeve had christened it – the tiny cabin, barely bigger than a broom-cupboard, which had been turned over to monitoring Cait Sith and was also used for tinkering with his other gadgets.

"Explain 'the chances are good'." Cloud simply said. Reeve gave the little boy, still exhaustedly clinging to Cloud, a long considering look.

"Sephiroth has always been primarily your responsibility, when we've dealt with him. It appears that hasn't changed." Cloud gave a short 'huh' of ironic laughter. "I think that it will be best if you – with Tifa's help, of course – retained that responsibility on an on-going basis. You're both good with children and you're best placed to understand what it's like to deal with his level of enhancement. And Tifa has her own, albeit much lower level, enhancements and is used to living with _you_." Cloud winced, very slightly, at that reminder.

"And 'the chances'?" Cloud asked him.

"We can't know for sure until we see everything about Jenova that that lab contains. Everything we were able to find out before we came back says that all of the Jenova research happened in Nibelheim until Sephiroth was at least six years old... He's fallen asleep?" Reeve asked, seeing that the little body had slumped against Cloud, just a bit.

"Yes. Mako treatments are a bitch. It's only how scared he was, that stopped him dropping off before now."

"Has anyone used the word 'JENOVA' in front of him?"

"I think so... yes... in fact, wasn't it Cait that did? He didn't respond at all. I'm assuming he hasn't been told who his mother supposedly is, yet – he certainly reacted to the name 'Hojo' strongly enough."

"He'll need to be told that that man was his biological father, when he's older. And about Lucretia and JENOVA. I know you and Tifa will be able to find the best way to do that." Cloud nodded slowly, looking thoughtful.

"Yes. It had to have been all of the secrets and lies that allowed him to so easily believe what he found in that place last time around... Gaia, Reeve, I spoke kindly to him for a few seconds and almost the moment he was free he was clinging to me. I don't think anyone has ever been kind to him in his life. Is that all Sephiroth needed not to go psychotic back in our time, some kindness and care?" Cloud looked perplexed and perhaps even a little guilty.

"Who knows? Not by the time you crossed his path, certainly; I doubt that what Hojo had done to him had left him able to even understand or respond to kindness or caring in any normal way. What we've already done today has changed so much that we'll never have any way of knowing." Both men were quiet for a few moments, Reeve inputting occasionally on the keyboard in front of him, and speaking quietly once into the microphone.

Ferne appeared and handed both Cloud and Reeve coffee and was thanked by them both, before she disappeared as quietly as she had appeared and the two men went back their troubled contemplation of their situation. Cloud eventually broke the silence.

"Seems weird, doesn't it, realising that nothing will ever exist of our old lives, after today's work – will never have existed, except in our memories."

"That's good... mostly, I think. And bits and pieces will still exist. The three of you who are due to be born in the next few years _probably_ still will be – we've mostly changed, and will change, the big things, not the small personal ones. You know that."

"Maybe I should find a way to warn my mother about trusting handsome blond strangers from ShinRa who will be assigned to perform maintenance on the reactor, in a few years time! She'd have been a lot happier, in some ways, if she'd never ended up an unmarried single mother. Nibelheim did _not_ approve!"

"In some ways, she might. I imagine, though, that if you'd ever asked her, she'd not have traded the regard of a few judgemental people for her son. Few mothers would." Cloud nodded, giving Reeve a small smile.

"I know, and I know we said that we wouldn't try any personal fixes - I just didn't realise how tempting it would be once we were actually here! Especially since she's just down there." Cloud gave a twisted smile as he nodded in the general direction of the town, then his smile became less twisted. "I wish I could, at the very least, go and tell her that she needs to think up something a bit more manly than 'Cloud' to name her only son!

Reeve gave a low laugh at that but said nothing more, concentrating on his monitors; when he was controlling Cait Sith, Reeve was never much of a conversationalist.

"I'd better find this little one a bed." Cloud said, standing up carefully, so as not to wake the boy.

Reeve watched him go. He was thinking about the adult Sephiroth; not the madman who had caused the whole planet so much grief, but the one Reeve had first seen and known superficially, at ShinRa, many years before. The man had been aloof and unapproachable, but had anyone ever tried to see beyond that outer facade? Reeve knew he never had. Given their respective positions, they had barely known each other and Reeve, at the time, had felt no wish to try to befriend the legendary, standoffish and, frankly, rather frightening SOLDIER First Class.

* * *

Even in his sleep, Sephiroth had continued to cling. Cloud had eventually detached him and laid the little boy on his and Tifa's bed. He'd kept a hand resting gently on the boy's shoulder as, without Cloud's touch, he began to whimper in his sleep.

Cloud looked at him without really seeing him as he replayed the events at the lab in his head. It had gone to plan – remarkably to plan. They'd walked in and, at first sight of Hojo, Vincent had neatly shot him right between the eyes. They'd half-expected he might mutate and attack them as he had in the past... future. He hadn't, and his body would soon be incinerated with those of the lab techs, Turks and other staff they had killed, destroying whatever JENOVA cells might already be inside it. If there was another way they could have achieved what they needed to, none of them had been able to think of it. They couldn't let anyone go, to run back to ShinRa and tell tales. It had been horrifying, though, slaughtering people who were incapable of fighting back. He hated scientists, especially hated anyone who would willingly work under Hojo, but at least the two Turks had fought back, not just run screaming. He was fine with the idea of fighting; slaughtering people unable to even try to protect themselves, though, that was something entirely different.

He forced his mind away from that, going back over the various conversations he'd had about the little boy his hand was resting against. Tifa was probably going to want to kill him for this, but he agreed that he, and hopefully by extension she, had to be the ones to act in the role of parents to the boy. There were, potentially, going to be various problems as he grew up and it would be very helpful if someone who understood what it was like to be chock-full of mako and JENOVA cells was looking after him.

After he and Tifa had got back together, after the Geostigma was cured and they eventually had begun to talk about getting married, they'd also spoken about adopting more children. They'd both wanted that and had begun to look into it, though that was quickly halted by Sephiroth coming back from the dead for a third time. At that point, they had shelved the idea. If he could keep returning, even after the healing rain had supposedly cleansed JENOVA's taint from the Planet, then they would not expose more children to their messy, unstable, continually threatened lives.

Any threat was probably gone now. His eyes focused on the little boy. _Probably_.

Surely Teef would be understanding; she always had an abundance of love for everyone, so she'd find it in her heart to care for this little one... surely? Anyone who could continue to love _him_ when most of what he had done was cause her stress, danger and heartache would manage this, much easier, task. And Reeve was right, she was used to dealing with the problems enhancements could bring due to his... and her own. He wished Reeve hadn't reminded him of that; most days he could pretend it had never happened.

Cloud closed his eyes for a moment. He still clearly remembered the day that, a few months after Meteor, he had noticed, as he sparred with Tifa, that her eyes had a very faint amber mako-glow. When Tifa had brought him round with a Cure – her punch having connected full-force and knocked him out, as he'd frozen in place, staring at her eyes – he'd demanded to know what the hell was going on. The glow was so faint that she had never noticed it herself and hadn't had any idea what he was talking about.

A trip to the local doctor's surgery hadn't been able to elicit much information, except that Tifa had been told that the doctor's educated guess was that it probably had to do with her boyfriend's mako-enhancements, added to whatever mako she had absorbed during her tumble into the Lifestream - as if that hadn't been their own guess. So they'd approached Reeve – Cloud, especially, with enormous trepidation – and asked to speak to anyone in the WRO's science department with any knowledge of mako enhancement.

"How much do you know about what impact mako has on your sexual health, Mr Strife?" Doctor Rutherglen had asked Cloud, who was at the point of panic, due to being in an office that overlooked a lab.

"I don't..." He had only fragmented pieces of Zack's knowledge to draw on. "It makes me pretty much immune to STDs and with my mako levels, I must be totally infertile... that's about all I know."

"How long since your last mako treatment?" _Treatment?_ He'd never had a 'treatment', just been shoved into a damned great vat of the stuff.

"It'll be close to two years... though Tifa and I both fell into the Lifestream a few months ago – I'd imagine that has something of the same effect." It was twenty-two months, at his best estimate, since Zack had freed him from his tube of mako.

"And you've been having unprotected sex, including oral sex, with Miss Lockheart for eight months?" Cloud had blushed at that – at most of the conversation, in fact – his natural inclination would have been never to discuss their sex-life with anyone but Tifa, least of all with anyone in a damned white coat! He hadn't even thought about using condoms; there hadn't ever been a need, or so he'd thought – no chance of STDs or pregnancy. Hell, until that night under the Highwind, they'd both been virgins, for the Planet's sake! Neither was particularly expert about this sort of thing.

Doctor Rutherglen, apparently, liked to lecture, so they'd heard a long-winded explanation of the research into mako levels in excreted bodily fluids. What it came down to was that it took around three years for the mako levels in someone's body to reach an equilibrium point, if they ceased treatments. Until that point, there would be low levels of mako present in saliva and a comparatively high concentration in semen.

"So what you're saying is that I've... 'infected' Tifa? Is it permanent?"

"As with your own, Miss Lockheart's levels will drop a little, until they reach an equilibrium point."

"But I've left her permanently... _contaminated_." He'd said, self-loathing evident in his voice. Shoving his chair back hard, he had jumped up and marched out of the room. He'd heard Tifa calling after him but had ignored everything until he was half-way down the corridor, at which point he'd spun on his heel and marched back. As he approached the lab he'd heard Tifa apologising for him in a low voice.

"... far from his choice to be enhanced like this." She'd been saying.

"Doctor. I have no clue how mako affects women. I need you, please, to tell me exactly what I've done to Tifa," he interrupted, "but, even more importantly, I also need to know if I've infected her with JENOVA cells." He'd demanded from the doorway, shuddering very slightly at the very thought that he might have somehow contaminated Tifa with more than just mako – that he could be the cause of her carrying genetic material from the Alien-Bitch-Queen-From-Hell.

"I'm pleased to say that there are no traces of anything out of the ordinary in Miss Lockheart's blood other than a mako level that is approximately seventy percent that of an average, fully treated SOLDIER Third." Cloud had closed his eyes and released the breath he hadn't even realised he'd been holding. "Mako has similar effects on women as it does on men. Strength, speed, enhanced senses and metabolism etc. – as I understand that Miss Lockheart is an extremely accomplished martial artist, I'm sure she will appreciate the boost. As for what we have been discussing, SOLDIERs Third Class are... were generally sufficiently fertile to father children, as were a little under half of the Seconds on record. The fact that very few SOLDIERs fathered children was more to do with youth and choice – probably based on the lifestyle and the danger of the job. Based on what we know from a very limited test population, women's fertility seems to be affected slightly less than men's and, therefore, I would anticipate Miss Lockheart having no trouble conceiving due to this... though obviously _you_ would not be able to... _you_ could not be the biological father, in that case." She looked sympathetic, which had just annoyed Cloud more.

"Yes, I'm aware." He had said drily. "It won't be an issue anyway, I won't risk contaminating Tifa further." He'd strode out again at that point.

He'd waited impatiently for Tifa in the parking garage beneath the WRO offices. She'd arrived looking unusually belligerent, a couple of minutes later.

"Did that mean what I thought it meant?" She'd demanded, arms akimbo, ignoring the crash-helmet he had tried to wordlessly hand her.

"Probably. Condoms can split, I won't..."

"And _I_ have no say in this, I suppose?" Seconds ticked by as he'd stared at her.

"No." When he hadn't elaborated, she'd gaped at him.

"Just like that, Cloud? It's over because you say it is, because you're too scared to even try to work around this? You said you loved me!" She'd burst into tears and he hadn't been able to stop himself reaching for her. She'd stiffened and pulled away when he'd touched her.

"I _do_ love you. I want to be with you. I just... being with me has caused you permanent harm, Teef, I can't risk..."

"Harm? How much harm, how much _pain_ do you think you're causing me now?" She'd asked and it had been his turn to flinch away.

"This isn't where we should be discussing this, Teef, let's go home and..."

"Home?" Her voice had gone quiet. "Are you, at least, intending to stay, Cloud?"

"I... If we aren't going to be... together, would you rather I moved out?" He'd asked, not looking at her.

"I don't accept that we aren't going to be together... but even if you are going to insist that we don't sleep together, I don't want you to move out. Hell, Cloud, I don't want you to move out of our bed!... But you're going to, aren't you?" He nodded, still not meeting her eyes.

The next fifteen months of living together, while not 'together', had been incredibly difficult for both of them in so many ways. It had taken the appearance of the Remnants and the return and defeat of Sephiroth – and the unplanned, fantastic 'thank-the-planet-we're-both-alive-and-well' sex afterwards – to bring Cloud to realisation that Tifa was right and that, even if he had 'harmed' her by inadvertently dosing her with mako, what he had done to her, subsequently, had hurt her a lot more...

… and he was fixating on this because of what he'd done today, lashing out at her verbally because he had felt inadequate when he found he couldn't bring himself to follow through on on the plan to kill little Sephiroth as well as all of the adults in that lab and that was making him feel guilty. He knew she would forgive him, she always did, but he shouldn't have done it, anyway; she'd only been trying to help.

He sipped at the remainder of his rapidly cooling coffee, as he thought about the situation. Cloud liked his own company – the product of being an only child, probably, he'd concluded years ago – but he didn't like it so much when he had too much to think about; he tended to dwell on the negative. Thankfully, there was a knock on the cabin door. Cloud winced, knowing that whoever it was thought it had been done quietly, but to him it was clear and sharp and he looked down at the little boy, whose hearing was probably particularly sensitive after the mako today. Luckily, he was also worn out due to the mako, and the little body under his hand didn't stir. Marlene's head appeared around the door.

"May we come in, Dad?" Cloud gave a quiet assent to the two girls. Marlene perched on the end of the bed, while Ferne sat in the folding chair that could be used at the tiny desk in one corner of the cabin.

"Denz and Aunt Yuffie should be there by now." Marlene said, looking expectantly at Cloud, who just nodded slowly, not sure what he was expected to say to that; he wasn't feeling like he could be particularly reassuring about it.

"I think he thinks he was sent along to protect her, while I'm pretty sure it's the reverse." Ferne said with a small smile.

"Either way, they'll be fine." Cloud said, smiling a little. "Even pregnant, Yuffie's more than up to dealing with the odd Valron, or a few Nibel Wolves, which is as bad as it's likely to get around here, and Denz has enough training to back her up effectively, so don't either of you worry about him." Cloud would do enough of that himself, though not about Denzel's abilities with a sword. No, Denzel's psychological and emotional well-being upon seeing what Cloud and the others had done in that lab were what bothered him most. The aftermath of that slaughter wasn't pretty. Dammit! He should never have sent Denzel down there.

"What's wrong with him?" Marlene asked, nodding towards the little boy, still fast asleep despite the talk going on around him.

"Just exhaustion; it's the mako treatment, he should be a lot better in the morning."

"Well, I always wanted a little brother or sister." Marlene said after a moment, with a half-smile.

"I'm pretty sure you didn't expect it to be _Sephiroth_ , if you ever got one." Cloud said quietly, studying her intently.

"No! But... what else could you have done, really?"

 _What I was supposed to, what we had planned that I would._ Cloud thought, only giving Marlene a shrug and a slightly unhappy look. After a moment he changed topic.

"Are you okay, Marls? You know what my hearing's like, I couldn't help but overhear you and your Papa, earlier. I don't think I've heard Barret that angry since he first heard you calling me 'Dad'." That had been an epic row!

Marlene had taken to calling Tifa 'Mum' almost as soon as they had all moved into the new Seventh Heaven, but it had taken several years, and the announcement of Cloud and Tifa's engagement, before she had tentatively asked Cloud if she could also call him 'Dad'. He'd been far from unhappy about the idea, but had been very concerned about Barret's reaction, and told her so. Marlene, in the very adult way she'd had, even as a very little girl, had gravely explained to him that she'd given this a lot of thought. She said that she had always called Barret 'Papa' and always would, so it wasn't the same thing, and she wanted to call Cloud 'Dad' because she wanted to acknowledge that that's what he was to her on a day-to-day basis. She said she'd explain it all to her Papa the next time he came to visit. There had, though, been a certain implication there that if Barret didn't like it, he could lump it, which made Cloud dread his next visit, just a little.

Marlene had been about eight at the time and, soon after, Barret had come to Edge to spend a few days with his daughter. She had arrived home from school with Denzel – at eight and ten they were considered old enough to walk the quarter mile on their own – to find Cloud and Barret sitting in the kitchen, each with a beer in his hand. She had flown to Barret and hugged and kissed him, before clambering off his lap and glancing across at Denzel, who was rooting through the fridge, looking for a snack, and turning to Cloud to ask "Can I get something to eat, too, Dad?"

Barret had glanced between the two and his dark skin had done nothing to hide the angry flush which had suffused his face. The argument that had followed, which thankfully had not turned physical in front of the children, had still been horrendous, much like the one between Barret and Marlene, just that day.

Marlene had been spending a few minutes in Barret's tiny cabin that morning, talking with him, when he'd apparently said something which demonstrated his assumption that she'd be living with him, once they were settled. Cloud happened to have been walking by the door, just after that and he'd heard:

"No, Papa, now you're being silly. You _know_ how much I love you, but I love Mum and Dad too, and I've lived with them as long as I can remember. Of _course_ I want to stay with them!" Cloud had hurried away, not wanting to get drawn into this, if either of them chose to leave the cabin at that point, but since both Barret and Marlene's voices got louder and louder, he couldn't help hearing the rest of the row, no matter where he was in the ship. It had, in fact, become loud enough that everyone on the ship had known about the argument, though Vincent and Nanaki were probably the only ones whose hearing was also good enough to have distinguished most of the words.

It hadn't left a pleasant atmosphere, and Barret and Marlene had avoided each other for the rest of the day. Until they had headed out to the ShinRa Mansion, Barret had ignored Cloud too, other than throwing him resentful glares whenever their paths crossed.

"I'm okay, and Papa will get over it, but I'm not going to go and live with him, Dad, whatever he says. I didn't say it to him, because the last thing I wanted to do was hurt him, but he hasn't been much of a father to me the last few years – I only see him for a few days at a time, a few times a year. _You're_ my Dad, _properly_ my Dad." Cloud smiled at her, even as he winced inwardly for Barret.

"He's does do his best, Marls, and..." Cloud shrugged, he really didn't know what to say, they both knew that Barret could have been more of a father to Marlene; no matter how much he loved his adopted daughter, he hadn't been there for her, much of the time.

Once he'd eventually worked out how to be a less crappy boyfriend, then husband, Cloud had done his best to work out how to be a half-decent father too – he'd put up with temper tantrums, teenaged moodiness, childhood illnesses and has suffered regular bouts of a panic when he started to feel overwhelmed because, though he often felt like he was barely out of childhood himself, he was having to take responsibility for a couple of kids. It hadn't been easy, but looking at the girl in front of him and thinking about Denzel, he knew it had all been more than worth it; they had grown into fantastic people that any parent could be proud of.

He looked down at Sephiroth, still fast asleep, and tentatively lifted his hand. No whimpering. The little boy must be deeply enough asleep now not to sense the removal of Cloud's hand. Cloud noticed a questioning look from Ferne.

"He's touch deprived, I think." Cloud said, in answer. Both girls just looked blank.

"It's sometimes known as being 'skin hungry' too. Babies who have all of the... functional things done for them have still been known to waste away and die if they don't get any sort of kind or loving touch. Hojo would know that, and so I'll bet he'd have had someone hold Seph occasionally, as an infant, but it wouldn't have been nearly as often as he _really_ needed, and I doubt he bothered at all, once the age when touch deprivation is most detrimental and dangerous had passed. It still stunts children's emotional and psychological growth, though. Adults' too.

"He'll need plenty of cuddles over the next few months. Is his 'big sister' up for helping with that?" He asked Marlene, with a slight smile. She nodded, smiling back.

"How do you always know about this stuff, Cloud?" Ferne asked, suddenly. She received a long look, in return, as Cloud decided how to answer that.

"I... don't like doctors." He eventually said, hesitantly. "You know my history. I should probably have had years - _decades_ \- of therapy to try to help me get over everything, but no-one, not even Teef, was going to get me anywhere near a psychiatrist! But I eventually realised that I did need to get a better understanding of... myself... why I was so... broken and why I couldn't seem to simply fix myself. So I started to read and research. I wasn't the sharpest tool in the box when I was young, but as well as the strength, speed and the more acute senses, mako also increases your mental acuity, so I found that if I did some background reading, I could take in and understand almost anything I felt I needed to know. I found out enough to get a handle on why I am the way I am and I've done my best to change the parts of me that I can and accept and work around the parts of me that I can't." He shrugged.

"I realise now that Zack and I, shut up in those tubes of mako for weeks at a time, without reprieve, became severely touch-deprived – though admittedly that was far from the worst effect! Every few weeks they'd take us out of the mako for a few hours and dump us in a reinforced cell, while they cleaned the tubes. We were so sick and weak and I quickly stopped really being able to move about on my own, but Zack would crawl over to me and wrap his arms around me and, even though I was in a worse condition than him, for the first few month - while I was still semi-conscious of my surroundings - I'd do my best to hug him back. We'd sit like that for as long as we could – hours sometimes – I didn't realise why we both felt so compelled to do it, but that's what skin hunger does, you become desperate for a kind touch." Cloud's explanation was matter-of-fact; he'd long since come to accept his own past, but he didn't talk much about it and both girls looked appalled.

"Anyway," he said with forced cheer, " _I_ may never stop being a bit broken but we have to hope that Seph, here, is still young enough to be fully fixable. We'll need you both to help out; plenty of kindness and lots of cuddles - once he's more used to you both - will do wonders; you'll see." He knew it would take a lot more than that, but it probably wasn't a bad start.

* * *

 **Author's Note:**

Like I said at the start, I haven't told the story of how they got back in time. I planned out and then wrote some of it as a second half to the prologue – it was a scene where AVALANCHE were having the get-together, a few days later, that Tifa mentioned, where they discussed ways of dealing with possible future JENOVA reunions, and no-one had any bright ideas. Then Reeve said that one of the WRO scientists had accidentally found a way to make a matrix out of time materia that would send people and things back in time, but that, so far, the best they thought they could manage was about forty years, and that it would use so much energy to power it, that it wasn't worth it and then it went on and on and all got rather technical and dull. Really dull - in fact the whole thing was dull, so I decided to skip it altogether. Hopefully the story will fill in enough other details as time goes on. My apologies, if it is confusing at the moment.

What I've learned from this is that trying to write from the perspective of a three-year-old, even an incredibly precocious one, is extremely hard, and I don't think Sephiroth really seems enough like a small child, in his perspective. Then again, he's an incredibly precocious small child in a very not-small-child situation. Still, I really hope I'm pulling it off better than I think I am!

Lastly, 'Word of God' apparently says that Cloud and Tifa did have sex under the Highwind that night, towards the end of the original game – so I've stuck with that as the consummation of their (initially very rocky) relationship. Like I said, I'm trying to stick with more-or-less canon, where possible.

P.S. I know an awful lot of FF7 time-travel stories are Cloud/Sephiroth. I hope you already realise, given what you've just read, that this is definitely not going to happen here. Never - not ever! That would just be too wrong for words, in the circumstances!


	3. Chapter 2 - The Water

Better late (really really late) than never, I hope?

So, at the end of this chapter there's enough bad language (frequent and prolonged use of the f-word) that I felt that I was obliged to turn this into an M-rating. Let's be honest, with Cid in the story, it was always going to go past the T-rating's 'minor coarse language', wasn't it? (Even if Cloud and Barret are actually the main culprits, this time.)

(On the other hand, anyone who thinks that a bit of bad language is going to upset or shock the vast majority teenagers needs a reality check, but I'll stick to the letter of the law, nevertheless.)

* * *

 **Chapter Two – The Water**

Sephiroth was three years, eight months and three days old when he woke up slowly and decided groggily that dreaming about a man called Cloud taking him away from the lab was a lot better than his usual horrible confused scary dreams about Professor Hojo and pain. He came awake slowly and tried not to open his eyes, since he knew when he did he'd still be strapped to the metal table in the lab and everything about feeling safe with Cloud and leaving the lab and never having to go back would turn out to be a dream. Cloud wasn't even a name, it was... some sort of atmospheric phenomenon... he thought. Oh no! He was supposed to know this. What if Professor Hojo asked and that was all he could remember, the Professor would be... not very nice again...

As he curled in on himself in a form of reflexive protection, he came suddenly fully awake, realising that if he could curl up, he certainly couldn't be strapped to a table. No, this definitely wasn't a metal table, since it was soft and he was curled up against something warm. He became aware of someone breathing slowly and steadily, close by him and, stiffening with worry, he opened his eyes and found himself staring at Cloud, the man he'd decided was nothing more than part of a dream. He sat up quickly and quietly and arranged himself into a cross-legged position, facing Cloud, examining the man carefully, trying to decide if this was another dream or if being taken out of the lab had been really real.

After a couple of moments of close inspection, he realised that there was someone else on this bed with them. Behind Cloud, facing away from him, but with their backs touching, there was another person, one with long dark hair. Sephiroth gave a small gasp when he saw that, and Cloud's eyes flew open. For a moment, the glowing blue eyes grew very wide, but as they went back to normal, he saw Cloud smile gently at him, so he automatically smiled back.

"Seph, are you all right?" Cloud asked very quietly. Sephiroth nodded back at him.

"Good." Cloud craned to look back over his shoulder and Sephiroth could see him give another smile before he turned back.

"Tifa's still deep asleep. Yesterday was a very long day for all of us. How about we leave her to sleep and go and find something to eat? You hungry?" Sephiroth nodded back enthusiastically. The day after he was given a mako treatment, he was _forever_ hungry, _achingly_ hungry.

"Good, hmm..." Cloud picked his watch up and put it on. "It's only a quarter to six and they all didn't get back until well after three. Lets go and get an early breakfast then – I doubt Teef'll be awake before ten, at this rate." Cloud eased away from 'Tifa', who Sephiroth thought was the pretty lady who Cloud had handed one of his swords to, the day before, and sat on the edge of the bed next to Sephiroth for a moment. He wondered why she slept in the same bed as Cloud, as far as he knew no-one back in the labs even had to share a _room_.

Cloud must have caught him frowning as he glanced between Cloud and Tifa.

"Tifa's my wife, Seph." Cloud murmured. It was weird how Cloud seemed to understand just how quietly he could speak and Sephiroth would still be able to hear and understand; no-one else did. Then again, Cloud had gently glowing eyes, just like him. Did that mean that he also had the 'enhancement' that Professor Hojo said made Sephiroth so special? If that was true, then Professor Hojo was wrong about Sephiroth being 'unique'. Sephiroth just looked his confusion at Cloud, though, not understanding the thing that he had just called the lady in the bed.

"What?" Cloud asked gently.

"What's 'wife'?" Sephiroth asked, though even as he did so he flinched. Questions weren't encouraged in the lab, but Cloud had prompted him to ask this one, so maybe it would be alright. Cloud blinked at him for a moment, his eyebrows shooting up. He frowned for a moment, then smiled though oddly it looked almost sad. Sephiroth didn't understand how a smile could be sad but that's what it looked like.

"Come on, I'll explain while we eat breakfast."

* * *

Cloud entered the galley, holding little Seph by the hand. At least he now knew that the boy could walk and talk and even if he didn't seem as inquisitive as a child of his age should be, he would ask questions when prompted. How to best explain marriage? Cloud mused. He'd grown up in a small town where almost all of the adults were married; he didn't think anyone had ever had to explain the concept to him, it was just part of life. If Sephiroth had never come across that idea before, what else was missing from the child's basic social education?

He thoughtlessly greeted the other occupant of the galley with a "Morning, Vincen..." abruptly cutting off the last syllable of the name as he realised that Vincent was wearing the hairstyle and clothes that Cloud hadn't seen him in for over five years.

"Oh... er... Good Morning... I should introduce myself, shouldn't I? I'm Cloud... and you're Vincent, of course... er..." So what did you say to someone who was a younger version of one of your friends, when you felt like you knew him but, as far as he was concerned, the pair of you had never met? He stalled, tugging on Seph's hand to draw him forward, he bent a little so that he could place a hand on each of the little boy's shoulders.

"Vincent, this is... Sephiroth." At some point he was going to have to get over his hesitancy at using the boy's full name, though apparently today was not that day. "Seph, this is Vincent. Er..." He watched the intense interest in Vincent's eyes as he stared at the boy. Cloud picked the little one up and seated him in a chair and pushed it towards the table. Seph's nose barely cleared the tabletop – they'd had a booster-cushion-thingy for Marls when she was this size and Cid and Shera must have something like that for Chloe, who was about Seph's age, but a lot smaller, so he'd look for it once he had worked out what to make for breakfast.

"He's... Lucretia's...?" Like Cloud's, the new Vincent's voice wasn't entirely certain, though Cloud wasn't sure if it was for the same reason. Though, the Planet knew, the man must be feeling just as unsure about pretty much everything as Cloud still was about his decision to rescue Sephiroth.

"Yeah... Yes. That's something Seph and I will be having a talk about sometime soon, so..." He said quietly, raising eyebrows appealingly at Vincent and the other man nodded slightly. This might not be the Vincent he knew, but it was still Vincent Valentine, and the man had never been slow to pick up on sub-text in a conversation.

"Seph." Cloud said cheerfully, looking down at the little boy who was frowning up at him. "What do you like for breakfast?" Sephiroth looked blank. Ah yes... the lab... it wasn't like the 'specimens' got to choose how to fulfil their own 'dietary requirements'.

"Right... well, first thing's first... I don't know what they made, but I do know that Marls and Ferne got bored yesterday afternoon and decided to do some baking with Cid's kids, so..." There was a cake tin on the table, which he opened.

"Hey! Chocolate chip cookies! Result!" Cloud was becoming aware that he wasn't entirely himself... actually he had inadvertently adopted a Zack-trait which was to fill uncomfortable silences with loud inconsequential nonsense. Why should he be at all uncomfortable? After all, he was only making breakfast for an unsuspecting child-version of his worse enemy and trying unsuccessfully to think of what you said to the newly awakened doppelgänger of one of your closest friends.

"Here, Seph, one for each hand... and don't let Tifa know I gave you those before I made you a proper breakfast, will you?" He said, handing over a couple of the cookies. Seph just looked perplexed at that request.

He munched down on his own cookie as he opened and shut cupboards, finding out what food they had and deciding what would be best for breakfast for a three-year-old.

"Cloud, _what_ is all this clatter and banging?" That was Vincent's voice, but not from where New-Vincent was sitting, nursing a coffee, and it was very much in Original-Vincent's tones when something exasperated him – which most often would be Yuffie.

"Hey Vincent! Just trying to find something nutritious for me and little Seph for breakfast. Eggs are full of... like... protein and other good stuff, right?" He winced. He was _seriously_ channelling Zack this morning! Really needed to get hold of that before he started doing squats to relieve excess energy and nerves. Hell, he'd gone into what constituted a healthy diet for the mako-enhanced in some depth, so he knew eggs were full of protein, calcium and iron as well as various vitamins... but Zack hadn't, and his surface-mind and tongue had somehow defaulted to full-Zack mode, and he knew he'd continue, unless he got hold of himself.

He turned to see Vincent – Original-Vincent – regarding him with a raised brow. They could all recognised when he was stressed and his alternative personality was peeking through. Cloud shrugged slightly, an apologetic look on his face and turned back to the counter where a couple of egg boxes were.

"Slow down and take a couple of deep breaths." Vincent said quietly. Cloud nodded and did just that.

"Thanks." He said, barely more than breathing the word and then did as he was told.

He turned back to Sephiroth and New-Vincent, more-or-less fully himself.

"Do you like eggs, Seph? You're allowed not to." He added quickly, crouching so that he was on a level with the boy.

Sephiroth just nodded, though he looked uncertain.

"Any particular way? I'm going to scramble mine, but we can fry or poach or make yours dippy, with toasted soldiers.

Sephiroth just shrugged, which left Cloud unhappy for the poor kid, but also wanting to roll his eyes. Surprisingly, it was New-Vincent who spoke up, and to Seph.

"I always liked dippy eggs best when I was little; why don't you try them that way?" He said, deep voice soft. When Seph only continued regarding New-Vincent uncertainly over the lip of the table, Cloud just took that to be the decision made and got up to sort out cooking them.

"Teef would probably tell me off for feeding two eggs at a time to a three-year-old, but Teef isn't here, right now, and she doesn't know what it's like to be as hungry as someone is the day after a mako treatment." He said as he tried to find a pan for soft-boiling Seph's eggs.

"Actually, she'd probably understand; I recall Tifa managing to eat the inn's entire supply of tinned sardines, on toast, the day she started to feel better after you two fell into the Lifestream – though the innkeeper seemed slightly disgusted, kept muttering something about cravings and teenaged pregnancies." Nanaki added to the conversation as he padded into the galley – the small room was starting to get a little crowded.

"Yeah, she did tend to look younger than she actually was, back then... still does, I guess." Cloud said with a fond smile, as he set a pan of water to boil. "She'd have been mortified, both about the woman's assumptions about her, er... condition, as well as the teenaged bit, if she'd known. And she still loves the things! I always tell her the damned things smell disgusting, but she just tells me that my enhanced nose can put up with it once in a while..." He walked over to the sink and filled the kettle. "Who wants coffee?" So perhaps he didn't need to channel Zack to chunter on, but at least he'd forced himself to lose some of his nervous tension and if he was chattering about inconsequential nonsense, it was his _own_ inconsequential nonsense!

"Tea for me, please." Nanaki said indistinctly as he took the fridge door in his mouth and yanked it open. "My tea-bowl should be in the cupboard with the mugs... Oh, for the Lifestream's sake, who moved my steak to the top shelf? I'll spill it all over the floor if I try to get it down from there."

Original-Vincent walked over to get it for him while Cloud, having popped bread into the toaster for him and Seph, turned back to check on the boy, having realised that things had gotten typically hectic, but that hectic was probably anything but typical for the boy.

Seph was curled in on himself, feet on the chair, knees hugged to his chest, his eyes wide and fixed on the big rusty-red shape now delicately eating from a bowl on a ledge set up for that purpose, about two feet from the ground. Cloud picked Seph out of his chair and sat him on his hip. He hoped Seph wouldn't resume last night's limpet-clinging, that would certainly make making breakfast difficult.

"Seph, I introduced you to Nanaki last night, he's a very dear friend of mine. What's wrong, Little One?"

"Does it eat people?" Sephiroth whispered to Cloud – so far, the most words he'd heard at once from the little boy.

"No, _he_ doesn't eat human beings and I guess it's best if you try to understand that when we're talking about people, that Nanaki is a person, himself, he's just not a human being." Cloud tried his best to make his tone gentle but firm.

"No, Little One, my kind don't usually eat humans; you generally taste horrible!" Nanaki's tongue lolled out as he gave his biggest grin.

" _Really_ not helpful, Red!" Cloud said, as he did his best to stop Sephiroth from trying to burrow right into his chest.

"He's joking, Little One, only joking. He's far more gentle and civilised than some of my other friends... I'll introduce you to Barret and Cid a bit later." Sephiroth had turned back into a limpet, though, and so he just kept on doing his best to make breakfast with a little boy clamping himself to Cloud's side.

"Ah, yes, one man with no volume control and the other with no ability to curb his profanities." New-Vincent put in quietly. Cloud had his back to New-Vincent, and kept it that way as he grimaced at Original-Vincent and Nanaki. He knew that AVALANCHE was probably a bit much to take, en masse, and honestly, Barret and Cid were the ones most likely to come across as abrasive and objectionable at a first meeting.

Or perhaps not only them, there was Yuffie, after all...

"I felt much the same about them, when I first met them." Vincent said to his younger self. "They are good people, though, you'll find that they grow on you, I think."

"Dare I even ask what you thought of me?" Cloud asked with a rueful half-smile, as he stirred his own quickly scrambling eggs with his good hand, supporting Seph with the metal one.

"I was... wary of you. Chaos tended... _tends_ to have little interest in humans, but he immediately told me that you had more than one person in your head. For a while, there, I assumed that you must have multiple personality disorder, or similar."

"So you knew before I did... and he was pretty accurate, wasn't he?" Cloud said with a sigh, grimacing as he scraped scrambled eggs onto his toast and checked the timer for Seph's boiling eggs.

"Hojo did an awful lot of harm to everyone in this room, Cloud..." He trailed off seeing Cloud's frantically shaking head and then exaggeratedly mouth the word 'Hojo' at Vincent and surreptitiously point to the little boy now clinging even harder to him.

"Seph's eggs need to come out when the timer beeps. Can someone do that, while he and I take a little walk, please?" He said aloud, keeping his tone light and calm.

Cloud walked briskly along the corridor, far enough from the galley to give them some semblance of privacy, then he angled his back against the wall and eased himself down it so that he was sitting on the floor, shifting the little boy so that he sat on Cloud's lap, though still held close.

"Seph... Hey... Come on, Little One, it's just you and me now. It all got a bit much, didn't it?"

"Mmm." The little boy agreed, though it sounded close to being a whimper.

"I wouldn't normally try to make you go back somewhere that you're uncomfortable, but there's a whole bunch of us stuck on this airship for the foreseeable future, and those two... I mean three... and Tifa, of course, are the ones you're likely to find the _least_ overwhelming. Vincent's wife, Yuffie – the Vincent without the tatty cloak and the bandanna, that is – she's kind of a bit like Barret and Cid, who I mentioned; a bit too much, until you get to know her. Anyway, what I'm saying is that if you really can't face it, we won't go back into the galley, but I'd really like you to try, if you can, because it's only likely to get worse while we're stuck on this ship. Can you try to be brave for me? I promise, Nanaki isn't going to hurt you – you honestly will love him once you get to know him – and we made sure that Hojo can never hurt you again, I promise."

"Is... is he dead? Professor Hojo?" The boy's voice was small and uncertain.

Cloud knew that three-year-olds weren't meant to have any understanding of death... of course, Marlene had had some idea when she wasn't too much older, but she was both very bright and had lived through the plate over her home sector falling, killing most of the people she knew, only a few weeks after her fourth birthday - amongst other things - damn Reno and ShinRa all to hell!

"You understand what it means for someone to be dead, Little One?" He asked, trying to hide his sorrow for any tiny child who understood that.

"'Death is the cessation of all cognitive, respiratory and pulmonary functions'." Sephiroth quoted in a quiet monotone. Cloud blinked and frowned slightly but then went on.

"And you understand that once someone's dead that they can never hurt you again?" Sephiroth gave a small nod, though he looked doubtful. The irony of that question, given who he was asking it of, suddenly struck Cloud and he had to make a great effort not to show the conflicting emotions he was feeling.

"Hojo _is_ dead. He can't hurt you... or me, or... the Vincents, or Nanaki any more. You see Vincent wasn't lying; all of us who were in that kitchen have been trapped and experimented on in Hojo's labs at one time or another. So, you see, Vincent wasn't trying to scare you by bringing up Hojo, he was just... trying to reassure me, because... well, never mind...

"And Nanaki, I _promise_ that he was only joking. Cid's children – Cid's the Captain of this airship – Nanaki even lets them ride around on his back, as if he was a pony, if they ask him nicely. He'd never ever let you or them get hurt, and he'd _certainly_ never hurt any of you himself! I promise, if you give him a chance, you'll like him."

It wasn't always easy to remember, but by his own species' standards, Nanaki was only about as close to being fully adult as seventeen-year-old Denzel, for all he was the second oldest person on this ship - or maybe that was the third oldest now, depending on how you counted Vincent and Vincent. At least ninety percent of the time he would act far more mature than the teenager-equivalent that he was, and he usually read humans superbly... then he'd do something like make that joke in front of the terrified little boy and Cloud, once any annoyance had died down, would be reminded that he should be giving the same leeway to Nanaki that he did to his own two kids about feet being put in mouths and lack of thought for others' feelings, because that's simply what teenagers did sometimes, without actually meaning to.

Speak of the Devil, Cloud thought as he saw a red muzzle appear around the kitchen door, tentatively.

"I want to apologise to both of you." Nanaki said, sitting down at least a half-dozen metres away. "I was put out by being called 'it' but I should never have made a joke in such poor taste when the little cub was clearly already scared."

"Cub?" Seph surprised Cloud by asking in a bewildered voice. Nanaki grinned at Sephiroth, who looked taken aback at the amount of large sharp teeth but then, to Cloud's surprise, he gave a shy smile in return.

"Vincent says that, while I am out here, I am to let you know that your breakfasts will soon be inedible if you let them get any colder."

"Oh... yeah. Seph, you feeling up to going back into the kitchen and eating? I promised you breakfast nearly an hour ago and we still haven't had it."

"'m hungry." Was, to Cloud's surprise, an actual verbalised response to one of his yes-no questions; he'd expected either only a nod or a shake of the head – the boy must be ravenous.

* * *

Little Seph remained very quiet eating in the presence of his elders, and Cloud kept a wary eye on him, which wasn't hard to do with the boy seated in his lap – that had just seemed easier than trying to find some sort of booster cushion, in the end.

Cloud was chatting idly to Nanaki and 'the Vincents' as he finished up eating his cold scrambled eggs – not a great taste experience – when Seph tugged on his tee-shirt to get attention.

"Hmm?" Cloud said, round his last mouthful of eggs and toast.

"What's 'wife'? You said..." The little boy said. Original-Vincent had just said something sarcastic about 'my darling wife'. Cloud gathered that was in response to Vincent having had less than an hour's sleep, as Yuffie, combining morning-sickness with travel-sickness had kicked him out of bed telling him that it was his fault that she was pregnant and so his fault she was feeling _this_ sick and so he could damned well stop snoring right in her ear and leave her to her misery.

"Er well, erm..." He still hadn't worked out exactly how to explain this one so that a child who didn't have any concept of the social norms would understand.

"Do you understand what people mean when they say 'family'?"

"Um... think so?"

"Allow me; I suspect you're about to over-complicate it." Nanaki said to Cloud. Cloud just shrugged and gestured to go ahead.

"Did the scientists sometimes teach you things back at the lab, Seph?" Nanaki asked. The little boy nodded in return.

"So you understand some biology and things like that?" Nod again.

"So do you know how male and female animals often become a mated pair in order to produce cubs?" Seph looked thoughtful, then gave a tentative nod.

"Humans do that too sometimes – fairly often actually. Sometimes, after they decide that they are a mated pair, they go through a ritual that makes it formal amongst humans – a declaration that they are mates forever. They call that marriage and the people in the marriage are referred to as 'husband' and 'wife'." Seph nodded with a look that was probably mostly comprehension.

"Cloud's wife is Tifa and he is known as her 'husband'. Vincent – _that_ Vincent – he is also married and his wife is called Yuffie; you'll no doubt meet her at some point today." He turned to the Vincent in question. "You know we have to find some easier way to differentiate between the two of you."

"Yes." Cloud added. "I _can_ keep on designating you 'Original-Vincent' and 'New-Vincent' in my head, but it would be easier if one of you is called something else. We _could_ all call you 'Vinnie', like Yuffie." Cloud suggested, turning to Original-Vincent, a wicked look on his face.

"No! You couldn't!... I suppose I could live with 'Vince', if I had to." He added slightly sullenly.

"It'll do for now." Cloud said.

It was interesting, Cloud reflected, that it was the non-human member of the group who could best explain the normal human conventions to Sephiroth. Perhaps he should just leave all of that to Nanaki from now on; perhaps the outsider's perspective made it easier.

Sephiroth, having finished his eggs, skewed himself around in Cloud's lap so that he could make eye contact, a questioning look on his little face.

"Do you have, er, cubs?" Cloud smiled at the way that was phrased.

"Children? I do, as it happens, two – a boy and a girl. They're a lot older than you, though, grown up, nearly. My daughter, Marls – Marlene – she came to see you, after we arrived on the ship last night, but you were already asleep. She's very keen to meet you, though. My boy, Denzel, will want to meet you too, and his girlfriend, Ferne, she was with Marls when she came to see you. Before you ask, 'girlfriend's' a bit like wife, just without the er... ritual."

Sephiroth turned back round and his eyes sought out Vincent. He didn't speak, though. So far, it looked like Cloud was the only one he would talk to.

"I don't have any children, yet, if that's what you are wondering, Little One, but my wife will be having our first child in about three months."

"How long _have_ you and er... Yuffie been married?" New-Vincent asked his older self, politely.

"Er..." Cloud wondered if he had ever seen Vincent blush before. He bit his lip to hold back a grin, on seeing that hint of pink now mantling the man's cheeks. "Just over a month." Vincent eventually said, voice a little stiff. New-Vincent raised an eyebrow but no-one commented further. The expression on New-Vincent's face left Cloud reflecting that it did bring a whole new meaning to the idea of being one's own harshest critic! Eventually, Original-Vincent spoke.

"Society has... _had_ changed. Yuffie never wanted to marry at all; you have no idea how much cajoling it took to persuade her that we needed to marry because of the stigma we would face coming back to this time with a baby on the way, if we _weren't_ married." Cloud hoped Seph didn't pick up on the time-travelling nuances in that speech. They'd all failed to guard their tongues last night when they found the boy, but he had been very unwell and more-or-less in shock about the whole situation, so Cloud could hope that very little had sunk in. This morning, though, Seph appeared to be listening and absorbing whatever went on around him like a little information-sponge. All small children were the same, in Cloud's experience, far more aware of what was being said over their heads than adults often gave them credit for. Despite that, he felt he should try to back Vincent up.

"Five years ago, when Tifa and I married, we were usually seen as quaintly old-fashioned, almost retrogressive. Either that or a lot of people saw it as further evidence that we were just backward hicks from the sticks. After Meteorfall – you've heard about that?" New-Vincent glanced briefly at Seph, raising a brow slightly, then nodded. "Well, a lot of society's values were reassessed and a lot of... 'normal' things were discarded, if they didn't seem absolutely necessary." He looked for comprehension in New-Vincent's face but, to his surprise, didn't see it.

"In our, kind-of-post-apocalyptic world, marriage had become simply a luxury and it was one most people couldn't afford, so values and judgements reflected that. Teef using my surname was often _really_ frowned upon, for instance; here and now, she'd be an oddity if she didn't and... probably seen as worse than that, at least by many of the older generation." New-Vincent looked thoughtful, so Cloud left it at that, and looked down at Seph, who simply looked perplexed. Best to move the conversation on, with a dangerously precocious little boy present.

"Sorry, Little One, grown-ups can get really boring, can't they?"

Seph just shrugged. Cloud was getting used to the child's lack of verbalisation but he'd been pleased that Seph had actually begun to ask some questions without being prompted to do it. Admittedly, Marlene's phase of asking 'why' about _everything_ when she was rising five had nearly led Cloud to tear his hair out in handfuls, but he knew children _should_ want to understand and make sense of the world around them; he'd have been extremely concerned if Seph had shown no curiosity at all.

Seph, in fact, hadn't seemed bored, even though most children his age certainly would have been, instead just seeming puzzled and bewildered, but he had seemed to be avidly trying to understand the adults' talk. Which was, of course, why Cloud had to shut the conversation down. Now... what to do to keep a super-bright three-and-a-half-year-old occupied when, so far, he would only have meaningful interactions with Cloud? Well... getting him washed and changed would take some time, and by then, hopefully, everyone else would be starting to wake up. Cloud wondered if it was worth trying to get him to make friends with Cid's children. Probably not yet, since he couldn't believe Seph could have ever met other children – maybe just play things by ear for now?

* * *

Barret knew he was being childish, sulking in his bunk when it sounded like pretty much everyone else had been up for ages. He didn't even like his cabin, it was tiny - so cramped that it came close to triggering his claustrophobia. And wasn't that pathetic; an ex-miner with claustrophobia? … Or maybe not, when his mining career had ended in a cave-in, he supposed. Not the point, though; it was nearly lunch time and he needed to be getting up and keeping calm and apologising to Marlene and talking things over with her. He should also talk to Cloud and Tifa – he just didn't want to; it was much easier to continue sulking.

He hadn't even needed Marlene's withering parting shot at the end of their increasingly loud and heated argument yesterday to tell him he should be acting more like an adult, but having heard his fifteen-year-old daughter tell him to 'we can talk about this again when you decide to behave like a _real_ grown-up, Papa' was not helping his motivation to get up and actually do that. He knew he wasn't being a 'real grown-up' and he even knew why; Cloud Strife had yet again proved to be the better father.

Goddess knew, he loved Cloud like he was his own little brother but... well... sometimes he also couldn't help but resent him – and that was very like real brothers, in fact, wasn't it? He sometimes wondered if they were even still friends. If they weren't, Barret knew that it was none of Cloud's doing and, nonsensically, he was resentful about _that_ as well.

As he finally dragged himself out of bed, he acknowledged that he didn't like being so bitter and petty, he just wasn't sure how to stop it; it was, more or less, an ingrained reaction, these days – something for which he hated both himself and Cloud, just a little.

Opening the door of his cabin he saw a small streak of giggling silver flit by, followed by a panting, slightly pissed-off-looking Cloud Strife, neither of whom seemed to notice him. He shook his head and went to look for brunch. As he left his cabin, Nanaki bounded past in hot pursuit, Cait Sith on his back. The Guardian took half a second to grin at Barret then dash off again, still pursuing their de-aged nemesis and fearless leader. Barret decided that, right at that moment, bacon was a more urgent calling than finding out what that was all about.

* * *

Cloud was exhausted. About mid-morning Seph's mako-induced hyperactivity had set in and he'd spent the rest of the day running about trying to keep up with the little boy while Seph 'explored'. Having come to the conclusion that he wasn't going to be shouted at or otherwise punished for being boisterous, Seph had taken full advantage of that fact and had bounded about the ship like a little mad thing for the best part of the next nine hours pausing frequently, if only briefly, for snacks and meals to refuel.

The Shera was a big ship – actually much bigger on the inside than the outside – a product of the Cetran magic that had created it, or rather recreated it, when Cid had reconstructed and refurbished it after the archaeologists had dug up its remains. Unfortunately that meant that there was a couple of miles of corridors for Seph to run about in and he had taken advantage of all of them, many times over. In theory, it wasn't as if chasing Sephiroth down was something new; in practise, he almost missed pursuing the madman instead of the hyper child... Well, no, he _really really_ didn't, he just tended to indulge in hyperbole when he was exhausted!

Nanaki had kept up with them for most of the day, hyper-Seph having rapidly overcome his trepidation, when it came to the Guardian, but even he had taken a couple of hours off, during the afternoon, to snooze in the sun up on deck. Cait Sith, not needing rest, and using others as his ride to keep up, as he'd abandoned the big moogle-bot years ago, had spent the day riding either on Cloud's shoulder or Nanaki's back as they trailed the little boy.

It was in the late afternoon that Cait Sith managed to get Cloud's attention and let him know that Reeve was becoming impatient.

"Impatient? What?" Cloud just looked confused.

Surprisingly, Cait's mouth just fell open and the almost entirely unused speaker inside it engaged, Reeve's irritated voice emerging.

"Are you ever going to bring the boy down so that we can give him the water?" Reeve sounded annoyed.

"Oh... Yes, sorry. I just... forgot." Cloud unsuccessfully attempted to stop himself flushing in embarrassment.

"You've had a busy day, I know, but this _is_ rather important."

"Yes, I know; you're right. I did remember after breakfast, but I though it was best to let Seph run some of the excess energy off exploring the ship. Apparently, he has _a lot_ of excess energy."

"Indeed." Came the terse reply. "Shall we meet in the galley, then?" Cloud nodded.

"See you in a few." Cloud said, still sounding a little abashed.

"Och. You know he'll be over his irritation by the time we get there." Cait said, back in charge.

"He has a right to be annoyed. It's important that we stop the..." Cloud looked at the little boy who was drinking in every word they said.

"Seph, we're going down to the galley. Those mako treatments that Hojo was giving you, there's something in them that can make you sick. I got very sick, a while after my treatments stopped, but it's just a type of water, it's doesn't even taste bad, or anything." Cloud saw the sort of sceptical, assessing look cross the boy's face that no three-year-old should have been capable of.

"Honestly. If it was some vile medicine we'd be going to the infirmary not the galley..." Seph looked unconvinced. "I'll drink some first, if that will help. It'll only take a minute, then we can continue exploring, if that's what you want." Seph shrugged and continued to examine Cloud with an unnerving intensity, but eventually put his hand into the one that Cloud had extended and they headed into the bowels of the ship.

* * *

As irritated as Reeve had begun to be, seeing Cloud _this_ exhausted drained the annoyance right out of him. It was a toss-up whether Cloud had looked more tired after the last gruelling battle with the adult Sephiroth than he did right now.

The miniaturised version was currently half-hiding behind Cloud. Reeve had noted through Cait's eyes that Sephiroth was developing a preference for dilutable blackcurrant squash and so he had rifled the cupboards to find the bottle and made it up with Aerith's water. It might feel a little sacrilegious, but he thought it was the easiest way to get Seph to take something that otherwise might seem like medicine.

And it was as simple as that, Sephiroth was definitely thirsty and so he drank it all in a couple of gulps, while Cloud, after raising a brow slightly at Reeve, just turned and filled the kettle and began to prepare coffee for himself.

Seph had clambered into a chair and was kneeling on it and reaching for the cookie jar, when he suddenly slumped forward, sprawling half onto the table. Cloud waited for a second, seeming to assume, like Reeve, that Seph had simply lost balance, and was essentially unhurt. Then Cloud, a moment before Reeve himself, realised that Sephiroth wasn't moving. Cloud reached for the boy and turned him over, but Seph was dead to the world.

"Er... well, I didn't expect _that._ " Reeve said worriedly. "We'd better get him to the infirmary asap. Is he just asleep as far as you can tell?"

"Yes but why? What just happened?"

"A reaction to the water, presumably." Reeve looked as mystified as Cloud felt. "Did you feel tired after Aerith's water?"

"Well, yes... but after everything that had just been happening..." Cloud shrugged, he'd felt bone-weary that day, but, it wasn't like there hadn't been other reasons for him to be exhausted!

"So he's probably just asleep. Almost certainly nothing to worry about." Reeve said, though he still looked slightly worried and perplexed.

Cloud leant over and put an ear to the little boy's chest for a few moments. In a SOLDIER - or the equivalent, in this case - that was at least as good as anyone else using a stethoscope.

"His heartbeat's strong and steady and his lungs sound clear and healthy. I'm loathe to take him down to the infirmary if it's not necessary, just in case he wakes up. I don't know..." Reeve watched as Cloud's bracer glowed twicein quick succession, and Reeve was pretty sure that the other man had cast Cure and probably Esuna on the boy, neither of which had seemed to do anything.

"Cloud, if he seems fine and the materia aren't doing anything, why don't you just put him to bed? Cait and I can stay with him, while you go and see everyone. If anything changes, we'll call you immediately." Nanaki said from where he had lain down just inside the doorway. His jaw practically unhinged as he yawned, just then. "Gaia knows, I'm not averse to a nap, myself, but I promise I'll keep one ear open, and it's not like Cait has to sleep."

Cloud wouldn't have said no to a nap, either, but he'd barely seen his family and friends all day and, just as importantly, he had no details of what, if anything, had been found in the paperwork that had been liberated from the labs.

* * *

Cloud trudged wearily to the smaller cargo hold that had been turned into a sort-of recreation room for the duration of their stay aboard the Shera. He could hear Barret's voice as he approached, but once he was close enough to make out the words he stilled.

"... eally pissed off with this! We've been at this all afternoon and now right into the evening while Cloud _plays_ with fucking _Sephiroth!"_

"I think we've probably all had enough of these papers for today." He heard Reeve say.

" _Not_ the fucking point, Reeve."

Great, just great! He could assume that Barret and Marlene hadn't resolved their issues yet, then. He just _loved_ how, to Barret, everything in the world was Cloud's fault whenever Marlene had had a disagreement with her Papa. He really didn't want to deal with this right now, so he resolved to just completely ignore Barret's existence for the evening, if that was what it took.

Walking into the rec-room he literally face-planted into one of the oversized beanbags that they were using for seating. He felt it shift and firm up at one side as someone perched next to him. Turning his head he saw Marlene, looking a little concerned.

"You okay, Dad?"

"Yeah, just tired. Thank the Planet that I will never have to try to keep up with a three-year-old on a mako-high ever again... presumably." With his life, you never really should say 'never'

He shoved himself up and turned so that he was sitting rather than lying next to Marlene. He put his arm around her shoulders and gave her a quick squeeze, before remembering that giving their daughter physical affection in front of Barret, when he was already pissed off about something Marlene-related, wasn't usually a good idea. Of course, he didn't really see why they should always have to tiptoe around Barret this way...

"Yeah, poor fucking Cloudy! Of course, if you'd killed the little bastard like you were meant to last night you wouldn't be so fucking tired now and we'd have had another pair of hands helping with all this shit! You know the actual _important_ shit!"

"Papa! Dad couldn't have... He's _three!_ " Marlene looked horrified, even though she'd been aware of what they'd planned. Yeah, Cloud thought, having a theoretical plan to kill an innocent little boy was very different to actually doing it – something that Barret was conveniently ignoring.

"Yeah, your precious, perfect Dad _could_ have! That was the plan and everything would be safer for you, and everyone, if he had. I'm only thinking of your safety Marls."

"Oh, fuck off, Barret! You're thinking of your own wounded pride, first and foremost." Cloud replied, getting to his feet, Barret had already done the same. It was confrontational and definitely not a good idea but Cloud had _so_ had enough of this shit!

"Yeah and whose fault is that, huh?" Barret's hands curled into fists at his side as he spoke. Cloud took a deep breath ready to spit out a response, but then something more important occurred to him.

"Marlene, you need to get out of here; this isn't something you need to see or hear." He _just_ had enough hold on his temper to try to prevent it being worse for the girl than it had to be. Though even knowing that her fathers were having a major row, basically about her, was bad enough.

" _No_ , Dad, I'm staying."

" _Yes_ , Marlene, _now_. Denzel, you and the girls go up on deck or something, please. Make sure your sister goes with you." Cloud said in a flat voice, not taking his eyes off Barret, who looked ready to explode.

He saw Denzel take Marlene by the arm and saw the girl try to shake him off, heard the boy mutter "no Marls, Cloud's right, looks like this is going to get bad, come on", saw her reluctantly let herself be led from the room.

"Cloud, Barret, that's enough! You aren't doing this!" This time it was Tifa who was trying to intervene. Everyone else seemed to be trying to pretend that the whole row wasn't happening, Yuffie even sitting down in front of the TV and taking up a controller for the game that Denzel and Ferne had been playing. Cloud gave a weary sigh.

"I think we probably are, Tifa; this has been a long time coming." Cloud said quietly, sounding nothing but tired, even if he was simmering with anger underneath.

"Always so fucking reasonable, aren't ya, Cloud. 'cept we all remember when you could barely hold your own fucking _reason_ together. Why the hell I thought leaving my girl with Tifa when you would be around to fuck everything up was a good idea..."

"Then why the hell did you?" Cloud asked – hissed it between his teeth, really. "'cause you're right, you know; back then I was a fucking mess, not exactly a great father-substitute. Then again, what choice did I have when her own Papa fucking _abandoned_ her?"

"I didn't abandon her. I left her with Tifa. Teef's always been like a mother to her, an' it was only ever temporary. I didn't leave her with Teef so that _you_ could take her from me"

"Temporary for a _whole_ _decade?_ So if I became her Dad, whose fault is that? Because that wasn't planned; all I ever tried to do was be there for her and help Tifa raise her right. Where were you? Where the _fuck_ were you, Barret?"

"What I was doing was important! You know that. I... I needed to..."

"You know what, I don't give a damn about what you needed. Did you ever think about what _Marlene_ needed? Were you the one who used to have to deal with her tears after she had waved goodbye to you – oh, always with a big smile on her face as long as you were in sight – because her Papa had been in town for the first time in four months but had only stayed for a couple of days, huh?" Cloud took a step towards Barret, even as something in the back of his mind told him that it was only going to escalate the situation, that this could so easily turn to violence. It didn't stop him from going on, he didn't think he could have stopped himself at this point.

"You know, three years ago when you took Reeve's job offer and told us you were coming to live in Edge? Tifa and I sat down and discussed how to handle things, we decided that, if you and Marlene both wanted it, we'd give up custody, maybe work it out with you so that we could have her with us some weekends, or whatever. We didn't want to - Gaia knows, we didn't - but you were going to be settled and stable and you _are_ her Papa and she adores you. But you didn't ask, Barret. You. Didn't. Even. Fucking. _Mention_ _it!_ Instead you got some fancy bachelor pad and that stupid sports car and started fucking around with a string of women half your age.

"And, you know, there was a part of me that was _grateful_ that you deciding to have a mid-life-crisis meant that we got to keep Marls, because Gaia only knows how much I love her and didn't want to give her up, but the bigger part of me wanted to fucking kill you for hurting her. Because she was _twelve_ , Barret, and she's far from stupid, so she was old enough to understand that if we weren't talking to her about what was going to happen with you, then you hadn't wanted her with you. We know that for sure because she eventually said as much to Tifa. And as much as Teef always, _always_ , takes your side about this, she couldn't lie outright; couldn't tell Marlene that her Papa had actually _wanted_ her." Cloud stepped forward and actually poked Barret in the chest.

"Because you didn't, did you? Why the hell do you want her now? _Finally_ spent enough time around us to realise how much more my daughter she is than yours, huh? And why is _that_ do you suppose?"

"You fucking little..."

"What, Barret? _What?_ " Cloud was shouting now. He needed to get hold of his temper, but he just couldn't, it was as if the words were being forced out of him. "Truth fucking hurts, doesn't it? How _dare_ you tell me that I took her away from you? You weren't fucking there, so just..." He stopped shouting to duck a metal fist.

Cid hadn't been in the room when this all started, it was about the time of night when he put his kids to bed, but Cloud suddenly heard Cid's voice, off to one side, as he balled up his own fists and fell into a fighting stance, too angry to just walk away like the tiny voice of reason at the back of his mind was screaming at him that he needed to do _right now._

" _Reeve,_ help me, for fuck's sake, he's going _green_." And Cloud knew what that meant. It was why, even as he'd got more and more angry, he'd kept trying to monitor his emotions, attempted to listen the the voice in the back of his head that told him just to shut up and walk away.

When anyone else let rage take them over they 'saw red', but not SOLDIERs; they 'saw green'. And that wasn't just a euphemism, everyone else could see it, their eyes started to glow much more strongly and would take on the sickly green cast of mako. So as he felt the two men grab him by the arms, he took a couple of deep breaths and forced himself to go limp. Even if Barret hit him, he'd heal – admittedly he'd heal _eventually_ if he was hit with Barret's metallic hand, but that was still better than letting himself do what he understood someone with SOLDIER enhancements could when they had really lost it.

He opened his eyes and they must have returned to their normal colour, because he heard Reeve heave a heavy sigh of relief. Poor Reeve, he was probably the least well equipped out of all of them to stop Cloud if he had gone on the rampage; Cloud would wonder later why Cid had called on Reeve of all people and would conclude that Reeve was probably the only other person in the room who had seen SOLDIERs go green and would automatically understand just how urgent it was that they try to get Cloud under control.

Cid, on the other hand, just looked confused when Cloud glanced at him, hanging grimly onto Cloud's right arm.

"How the fuck did you do that?" Cloud took another deep breath before responding.

"Do what, Cid?"

"Stop it?" Now it was Cloud's turn to be confused.

"I have no idea what you're talking about."

"Every time I've seen, or even heard about, a SOLDIER going green, it's like the receipt for wholesale fucking death and destruction's already been printed."

"Yeah, well, not a SOLDIER; never was." His tone was still far more brusque than it would have been under normal circumstances, at that reminder. He glanced over at Tifa who had a hand flat against Barret's chest, while Vincent hovered, probably ready to grab the larger man if he did anything. He heaved a sigh and tried to think of something that would 'press the reset' on the evening to regain some normality. After another deep breath he could almost laugh at that; who was he kidding, no-one in AVALANCHE had ever done normal. Still, he had to try, the best thing was probably just to get out of there for a while.

"I haven't eaten yet this evening, I'm going to go and scrounge something up."

"There's leftovers in the fridge." Shera called after him with what sounded like forced cheerfulness, or maybe just relief it was over, as he stalked out of the room - so at least he wasn't the only one who wanted to get things back to their approximation of normality.

* * *

Author's Note:

Sorry to the Barret fans out there.


End file.
